You guys are beating a live horse. Apocalypse 5 already
discusses arrays pretending to be strings for the sake of parsing.
The capability has to be there, and in fact Patrick has been bearing
that in mind in the design of PGE. The only question for p6l is how
much syntactic sugar you want.
I've always been a bit partial to explicit polymorphic declarations:
my byte [EMAIL PROTECTED];
to mean that $foo and @foo are two views of the same object. In that
sense, the implicit declaration of $/ is really [EMAIL PROTECTED]/ or some such.
And by happy chance, $@ and $% have both come available in Perl 6. :-)
Or we can just use traits like the Apocalypse suggests. But I like
the idea of highlanderish variables as long as they're explicitly
declared that way.
On the other hand, it does admit the possibility of people mixing up
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with @$foo. So perhaps the polymorphic forms are allowed only
in the declaration, and in normal code you have to pick one or the other.
Though I suppose it then becomes an interesting question whether
@foo ~~ $foo
returns true or not.
Larry
