Yes, I know that there is no S08. I'm working on writing one, and I'd like some feedback to help me do so.
My draft is going to be about Signatures and Captures. Thus, my questions: Invocants: * Is it illegal to specify an invocant in a sub, or is it merely nonsensical? That is, should the compiler complain, or should it silently treat the invocant as the first positional parameter? (The latter has the advantage that you don't have to worry about what the signature is being used for; it has the disadvantage of being, well, nonsensical: invocants are meaningless without the context of a method - and /maybe/ a role - to provide them meaning.) * Likewise, if I interpolate a signature with an invocant into another signature (somewhere other than at the start), is this an error, or will the invocant be silently converted into an ordinary positional parameter? * What types are you allowed to assign to an invocant? * Does anyone object to roles having an invocant, and that invocant referring to the class that is doing the role? Longnames: * Why are we using ";;" to denote the end of a multi function's longname? I'm thinking that doubling up on the normal delimiter may make more sense - which would normally mean ",,", but would mean ";;" if you're using a multidimensional argument list and the longname ends where a semicolon would normally go. * Can any required parameter be part of the longname, or are only positional parameters allowed? (I'm expecting the latter; but I'd like confirmation.) * Are placeholder parameters ever considered to be part of a function's longname? (I'm expecting that they aren't: if you want a longname, you ought to specify it in a formal signature.) Starting and Ending delimiters: * Why are pointy blocks forbidden from enclosing their signatures in parentheses, or from using the ":( ... )" notation? Is this a holdover from the early days, when parentheses denoted a list? Or is there still a good reason not to allow such notation? * Why do parameterized roles use "[ ... ]" for their signatures instead of ":( ... )" or "( ... )"? Named parameters: * Must required named parameters be defined before optional named parameters are, or are we allowed to interleave the two? Placeholder parameters: * does the use of placeholder parameters interfere with the use of the slurpy parameters normally provided by the default signature (i.e., *...@_ and *%_)? I'm guessing not. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
