On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 05:10:57PM -0700, Darren Duncan wrote: : I decided to bring out this Hash->Dict topic in a different thread : from the thread on Synopsis r14407 about Object->Universal since I : consider them separate though tangential matters that should be : argued on their individual merits. : : In the interest of that Perl data types are better off being named : primarily after their meaning rather than their implementation, : probably the current worst offender is Hash.
Nope. Hash is mostly about meaning, and very little about implementation. Please don't assume that I name things according to Standard Names in Computer Science. I name things in English. Hash is just something that is disordered, which describes the associative array interface rather nicely, distinguishing it from the ordered Array interface. The fact that it *might* be implemented using a hash algorithm is merely a nice association with some mnemonic value for CSish folks. Likewise, if I say Object I'm referring not to a CS object so much as an English object, which is just something that is fairly discrete and can be handled and treated as a single thing, even if it happens to contain multiple things. About the only nod to CS here is that you can call the .HOW method on any Object. Anything beyond that is the fault of the metamodel. In general I'm much more interested in the natural linguistic feel of Perl than in matching up with any particular standard CS terms. That's why you have "given" and "when", not "switch" and "case". That's why you say "next" and "last", not "continue" and "break". That's why we have "state" rather than "static", "my" rather than "var" or "decl", "contend" rather than "atomic", "maybe" rather than "orElse", "has" rather than "attr", "role" rather than "interface", and so on. Of course, it's possible to pick words that have too much overloading in the CS literature, but I don't think either Hash or Object really fall into that category, in the case of Hash because hash algorithms are a fairly minor thing, and in the case of Object because people are already used to all different kinds of Object systems, some class-based, some prototype-based, so generalizing to a kind of object that gives you both is not really a problem. And as I said before, part of the reason for using Object is political, because it means we're Really Doing Real OO™. And maybe part of the reason for *not* using Universal is also political, insofar as Perl 5's UNIVERSAL has been sorely abused in various ways, and I don't want people to have that mental association. (Kinda like the fact that Captures resemble anonymous typeglobs but we're *not* going to call them that...) Larry
