David L. Nicol writes:
> Do either of those expressions make sense in terms of
> references to something? If not, then syntactically we
> are in the clear. They don't, because currently it makes
> no sense to butt a reference up to the LHS of anything.
>
> It isn't any less clear than, for instance
> $fiename = "C:\$keythree\$keyfour"
Once again you show some code that doesn't work the way you seem to
think it does. You just made the string
'C:$keythree$keyfour'
> I don't care how "ingrained" the concept of wrapping the
> field names in curlies is, I still think it sucks, and so does anyone
> who arrives here after using a language where there is a character (which
> is conventionally dot) between the record name and a field in it.
I wrote a long response to this, but finally realized that my biggest
objection is that I think using a backslash sucks. You think curlies
suck. I think backslashes suck. You aren't proposing removing the
curlies from the rest of Perl, so what you're proposing is an
inconsistent-with-the-rest-of-Perl modification to the syntax to
suit your own tastes.
I'm all for learning from other languages, but it has to be consistent
with the rest of Perl.
I'd be more receptive to something that reuses existing or similar
Perl syntax (e.g., extend ->).
So in my opinion, you haven't really come up with a strong argument
against:
$foo->{first}{second}{third}
I can't stop you RFCing it, but I definitely think you're heading down
the wrong path.
Nat
