On Tue, 15 May 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:
> On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:30:07PM -0700, Dave Storrs wrote:
> > - A while ago, someone suggested that the word 'has' be an alias
> > for 'is', so that when you roll your own properties, you could write
> > more-grammatically-correct statements such as "my $var has
> > Colors(3)". Since 'are' is being considered as a synonym, is there a
> > possibility that 'has' will make it too?
>
> It would be disappointing if a substantial proportion of the built-in
> keywords were merely syntactic sugar for each other. is|are|has|: seem
> like far too many ways to express exactly the same concept.
I understand your point, but I respectfully disagree with it.
Consider that there are about 10 ways to do a loop (map, grep, for,
foreach, while, and at least 4 others that I'm not remembering at the
moment; before you say it, I grant you there are minor differences between
the constructions, so they are not "exactly the same concept," but they
are very close).
Perl has always put an emphasis on reading like grammatical
English--see all the Perl poetry, or look at the 'unless' keyword, or the
fact that conditionals can be prefix or postfix.
Finally, is ':' actually sugar for is? I guess I missed
that; I'll go back and read it again.
Dave
