On 2008-Jan-26, at 9:58 am, Larry Wall wrote:
My first thought is that this is such a common idiom that we ought
to have some syntactic sugar for it:
say "Received $m message\s."
I've always wanted a magic-S (and I don't think the anglocentrism
matters, because Perl is already pretty anglocentric -- more so than
plural S's, which apply to some other languages anyway).
Rather than extra syntax to specify alternatives, I wonder about
having \s work with arrays (which also provides a way to deal with
duals, for example):
say "Received $_ {<ox oxen oxes>}\s" for 1, 2, 77;
"Received 1 ox"
"Received 2 oxen"
"Received 77 oxes"
It might even be sophisticated enough to guess whether it should add
"es" or just "s", but anything beyond that probably belongs in a module.
use Locale::Lingua::EN;
say "There was\s {3} ox\s"; # There were 3 oxen
use Locale::Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
say "{3} bos\s erat\s"; # 3 boves erant
Although calling it "\s" loses its impact in other languages.... But
I think the underlying idea to seize on is a way to grab interpolated
values so that there's a nice way to do tricks like that. Preferably
in a way that doesn't look symmetrical so you can "point" it before or
behind.
say "I've got $bid dollar\s, do I hear {$< + 1}?"
Or using "$<" instead of "\s":
say "I'm bid $d dollar$< for @this[]$> $o @ox[]$<"
...except that I'm not crazy about calling it "$>". (If that would
even work.) But something like that. Perhaps strings should build an
array of their interpolations?
say "$a $b $c, this string contains [EMAIL PROTECTED] interpolations"
(Then again, maybe there's a time to break down and use (s)printf.)
-David
