Damian Conway wrote:
>
> Simon observed:
>
> > On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:30:07PM -0700, Dave Storrs wrote:
> > > - A while ago, someone suggested that the word 'has' be an alias
> > > for 'is', so that when you roll your own properties, you could write
> > > more-grammatically-correct statements such as "my $var has
> > > Colors(3)". Since 'are' is being considered as a synonym, is there a
> > > possibility that 'has' will make it too?
> >
> > It would be disappointing if a substantial proportion of the built-in
> > keywords were merely syntactic sugar for each other. is|are|has|: seem
> > like far too many ways to express exactly the same concept.
>
> I agree. However, we envisage that the Perl 6 parser itself will be
> highly mutable and comparatively painless to mutate, so it should be
> easy to set up modules that create as many synonyms as you feel are
> needed/necessary/required/essential/requisite/demanded/called for.
Here's a thought:
warn "half-(digested|baked) ideas ahead";
@a is constant; #sets @a to constant
@a has constant; #same thing
@a are constant; #sets *each element* of @a to constant
@a have constant; #same thing
See the distinction? This doesn't show well in the case of constant,
but consider a property that says "remember my old value whenever I'm
assigned to." We'll call this 'undoable'. In this case:
@a is undoable; #@a=() is noticed, @a[0] isn't
@a are undoable; #@a[0] is noticed, @a=() isn't (or maybe it is?)
#i could have used has/have instead, but is/are makes more sense here
--Brent Dax
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
