It seems to me that there are at least two important things missing
from this proposal.
1. There is no substantive rationale presented for why the change
would be desirable.
The only reasons you put forth are:
* The syntax is ugly and unintuitive.
Ugliness is a matter of opinion, and I don't think it has a place
here. Anyone else could simply reply, "Well, I think the =~ notation
is beautiful and elegant, and your notation is ugly and clumsy," and
there is no arguing with this point of view.
Intuition varies from person to person. I think the proposal would be
stronger if you would discuss some specific technical problems with
the existing notation. Normally when we say that a notation is
'unintuitive' what we mean is that it works differently from the way
people expect it to, so that they use it incorrectly. You have not
provided any examples of how =~ is used incorrectly.
* It performs a function that is semantically no different from
other forms of argument passing.
The same could be said for any operator, including +, and in fact some
languages do treat + as a function whose operands are passed as
arguments. For example, in Lisp,
(my-function arg1 arg2 arg3)
and
(+ arg1 arg2 arg3)
are syntactically identical. Since your argument here applies as well
to +, -, ->, etc., it is not clear why your proposal is for =~ and not
for +, -, ->, also.
I think you should add some sections to the proposal explaining what
the benefits of your proposed change would be.
The other thing that I think is missing from the proposal is a
discussion of precedence issues. For example, you did not say what
/pat/ $x . $y ;
would do. Is it equivalent to
/pat/ ($x . $y) ;
or to
(/pat/ $x) . $y ;
?
I also worry that there may be some lexical issues lurking here.
Are you sure that it's never ambiguous whether a particular / will
indicate the start of a pattern match or a division operator? I would
like to see some discussion of this.
I have several other complaints (I think you should either remove the
wacky ideas, or treat them fully) but these are my main worries about
the proposal.
