Dear Thomas, >>Is this supposed to be a joke Absolutely not. What I was trying to say is that there seems to be a trend to consider very relaxed identifier rules a good thing.
If Perl 6 wants to grab the road for 20 years, then perhaps this issue is more serious (this is why I quoted you in particular) than is obvious, because just as has been pointed out, relaxed identifiers could become what programmers actually expect. I also tried to say that as special characters (not 7-bit ASCII) like for hyper ops have already been admitted, the question of just how far ($foo&bar) this admission should (be allowed to) is just around the corner. When I look at Windows Powershell (dashes everywhere) or XML, where identifiers literally have to be tagged so we know what they mean, I can't say it's very pretty. I'm just interested in where the balance in all this will be. Apologies, Thom, for being imprecise and seemingly antagonizing. Kindly, Michael -----Original Message----- From: TSa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dienstag, 12. August 2008 09:25 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Allowing '-' in identifiers: what's the motivation? HaloO, Michael Mangelsdorf wrote: >>> Actually I can even imagine allowing almost all chars >>> in the middle of identifiers. > > Is this a trend we should extrapolate into the lifetime scope > of the Perl 6 language? > How far are we in this process, given Unicode guillemets for hyper ops? Is this supposed to be a joke or a serious contribution to the discussion? Mine was serious in the sense that I consider the enforcement of whitespace for infix ops a good thing or at least not a bad side-effect. What's so different in $foo-bar versus $foo*bar, $foo+bar or $foo/bar? The latter might e.g. indicate path variables. Or imagine a coding convention where junctive variables bear their generating operator: $foo|bar, $foo&bar and $foo^bar. Regards, TSa. -- "The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity" -- C.A.R. Hoare "Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it." -- A.J. Perlis 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12 -- Srinivasa Ramanujan
