On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Bart Lateur wrote:
> The argument against my reasoning would be if the bulk of people making
> this mistake are *not* coming from C. I don't know.
I have a feeling we're either arguing the same side without
realizing it, or we're just having a straight-up conversational rift.
Let me restate my opinion and see if that helps:
@a = (1, 2, 3);
print (length @a);
The result should be that 3 is printed.
The concept of "(# of elements in array) == (length of array)" is
a common one in many languages. It is intuitive to many people...I know
that I tried doing it when I first started using Perl. It does not seem
to particularly interfere with existing semantics (although, I'm sure
someone will point something out that I have not considered)...by which I
mean that "length @foo" does not currently have any frequently-used
meaning.
I like Perl because it generally DWIMs. This seems like a good
way to make it DWIM more.
Dave
