HaloO Luke,
you wrote:
if $a \ $b == 3 {...}
*If A nor B is 3 ...
What does the * in front of the if mean? Not? With "grammar reason" I meant the formal grammar of Perl6 not the one of natural english. Are you aware of such reasons?
In English it's more like:
if \ $a \ $b == 3 {...} If neither A nor B is three ...
I'm not a native english/american speaker but I think it's pretty much the same as the German "weder ... noch ..." for "neither ... nor ..." and "entweder ... oder ..." for the "either ... or ..." of xor. Also the plural/singular usage is the same. So I fully agree with you, that xor and nor have the same feature/burden as infix ops.
But since xor, ^ and ^^ are in the language already, consistency would at least allow nor, \ and \\. And nor is a proper english word, xor isn't ;)
BTW, there also was a thread about ',' and 'then'. There people complained about the missing 'and' in front of it.
I definitely like the symmetry. But we have to remember that the P in Perl (can) stand for Practical. The advantages of having syntactic symmetry are nice, and they aid learning. But they aren't nearly as important as semantic symmetry/consistency. (Not to say that they aren't important)
The lack of infix ops to go with the none junction has worried others before me. Unfortunately I don't find the thread were Larry rambles about this. The only thing I found was Damian disliking ! and !!.
Of course I wouldn't ask for a nand infix op for two reasons: 1) there's no corresponding junction 2) what should be the high precedence version?
We have a surplus of semantic ideas, and a shortage of characters on the keyboard. Adding seldom-used (and in this case, confusing) operators in the face of consistency is a Maxwellian thing, but I don't think it's hiding any deep truth behind it this time.
Well, not depth but notational convenience for small to medium sized junctions. Do you see chances to get that through? Or is the design more or less finished?
Compare:
say "nope" if $a \\ $b;
say "nope" unless $a && $b;
I find the latter actually reads well in our precious natural languages. The former just seems like golfing.
I agree fully. The if/unless and while/until pairs are nice lunguistic concessions of Perl. On the other hand, as a programmer it's not so far out. Definitly not more than xor---but I repeat myself.
Good night! -- TSa (Thomas SandlaÃ)
