On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Chris Dutton wrote: : So many operators... : : It's now clear what we need. Unicode operators. That should buy us at : least another week to hash out the rest of the necessary operators. ;-) : : It'd also silence the legions of critics who complain about Perl being : too easy to read if we, for instance, used the Kanji character for : watashi in place of $self, and the character(s) for anata for the : default topic.
Er, yeah. And one of the overriding design goals of Perl 6 is that programs spend more time undefining operators than defining them. :-) Unfortunately, anata doesn't work for the default topic. The whole point of the default topic in Japanese is that it's the 0-pronoun. So it'd have to be referenced as the null string if we went that route. Come to think of it, that's precisely what's happening with .method(). But anata means "you", and you're generally the topic only if I say "anata wa", semantically speaking. You can also be the topic in a pragmatic sense if I'm asking you a question. But most topics are third person, not second. We'd have to use something like "kore" or "sore" if we wanted something for an explicit topic reference. But usually it's implicit in Japanese. In fact, in Japanese, that last sentence wouldn't have an "it": "But in Japanese is usually implicit." Or in Japanese word order, "But Japanese-in usually implicit-is." In any event, there isn't really a third person pronoun meaning "it". "that" is about as close as you get. Larry
