On 11/2/05, Michele Dondi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, John Williams wrote: > > > But IMHO the reduction in typing for this relatively minor issue is not > > really worth the surprise to newbies at seeing operandless operators. > > I don't buy that argument as newbies are already exposed to all sorts of > surprises including operandless operators. Including mutating operandless > operators. What is s/// after all? Or is there a good reason for an > asymmetry between different classes of operators?
I think the difference comes from the Principle of Least Surprise. The various operators being discussed in this thread are all operators which are in languages that have common use - C, C++, Java, the .Net stack, etc. Regexen and the various built-ins are generally considered to be Perl-specific, so if they're weird, this is just a Perl-ism. The PoLS doesn't apply. Yes, from a consistency point of view, ALL operators should default to $_ or some other sensible item ($*STDIN for <>, etc). However, the PoLS does need to guide our decisions. Rob
