# New Ticket Created by "Kingsley G. Morse Jr." # Please include the string: [perl #21668] # in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. # <URL: http://rt.perl.org/rt2/Ticket/Display.html?id=21668 >
To whom it may concern, Thanks for improving Perl. I'm an old APL programmer who just read Damian's article on Perl 6 in Linux Magazine. As you probably know, APL is an array programming language. I noticed that Damian said Perl 6 will require variable names to use sigils that describe their shape. $ for scalars, @ for arrays, etc... At the risk of telling you something you already know, array programming languages like APL don't depend on sigils, or anything like them, to describe variables. Variable shapes and data types are stored internally and array programmers just use descriptive variable names. Really. Ken Iverson invented APL a long time ago and recently refined it into a better array programming language called "J". It doesn't use sigils either. Like APL, J stores variable data types and shapes internally and programmers just use descriptive variable names. I'm not making this up. Unless I'm missing something, it seems to me that Perl 6 could stand on the shoulders of refined array programming languages like APL and, more so, J. I realize it may be too late to change this part of Perl 6. Perhaps a compromise would be to make sigils _optional_ in Perl 6, like any other character in a variable name. Or <sigh> wait for Perl 7. Thanks for your time and attention, Kingsley G. Morse Jr.
