On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 05:44:49PM +0100, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 12:32:29PM -0400, John L. Allen wrote:
> > I think someone may have mentioned this already, but why not just say
> > that if you want '.' to mean concatenation, you have to surround it on
> > either side with white space? If there's no white space around it, then
> > it is forced to mean method invokation, or whatever else.
>
> This approaches "whitespace as syntax". Very few Perl operators care
> about whitespace between their words (even ->) or whitespace at all.
>
> More generally, its going to cause alot of careful squinting at code
> to distinguish between different operators. This will lead to subtle
> bugs because someone accidentally put a space after the . and didn't
> notice.
>
> Its just cutting it too thin. Don't go this route unless others are
> exhausted first.
ok, well.. I've heard arguments for '+' (namely that its intuitive, other
language compatible, etc...) so what are the arguments against it?
after all, it has a corresponding operator in minus:
"hey" - "y" = "he"
my $singluar = $plural - "s";
The only thing I could see gumming up the works is if one argument is a string,
and the other argument is a number, and both are in variables:
my $a = "hello";
my $b = 3;
print $a + $b; # should print "hello3";
print $b + $a # prints 3hello;
This would be doable ( along with making "$a > $b" context dependent ).
Question is, would it be too confusing, too prone to error? I like it better
than '~' (which seems odd to me..)
As for '.', well I think that makes sense if packages are 'first class', and
they can contain variables, ie:
class MyClass
{
my $a = 1; # instance variable
our $b = 2; # static variable
my @c = (1,2);
}
my $b = new MyClass()
print $b.a;
print @b.c
print $b.d{'a'}
print $MyClass::b;
Ed
