>A friend pointed out, technically most are trigonometric functions,
>not geometric. atan2, cos, sin, acos, asin and tan are all trig.
>exp, log, sqrt are... just math I guess.
>So I suppose the proposed module would be Math::Trig or some such. Or
>maybe, as the source code suggests, Math::High:Falutin.
>However, since those funtions take up about 200 lines in the core, are
>very stable and relatively easy to document, what do we win by
>removing them?
>PS The idea of adding acos, asin and tan is good.
It's sounding like folks want to delete this, delete that. Let's
just cut to the chase and propose that anything that can be redefined
be deleted. After all, if it's so mutable and boring that people
can diddle its definition, then who cares? Yes, that means that
anything that's not a reserved word should be banished from Perl,
relegated to some third-class back-of-the-bus module.
Which are those?
Those that return a negative number in the C-language keyword()
function in the toke.c file in your Perl source kit may be overridden.
Keywords that *cannot* be overridden are chop, defined, delete, do,
dump, each , else, elsif, eval, exists, for, foreach, format, glob,
goto, grep, if, keys, last, local, m, map, my, next, no, package,
pop, pos, print, printf, prototype, push, q, qq, qw, qx, redo,
return, s, scalar, shift, sort, splice, split, study, sub, tie,
tied, tr, undef, unless, unshift, untie, until, use, while, and y.
All the rest can--and so, it seems, should go to the back of the
module bus. If it had been all that important, it wouldn't have
been mutable.
--tom
