On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Luke Palmer wrote:
: I now realize I'm a little fuzzy on the yada-yada-yada operator. What
: exactly is it... or what does it do? Is it a statement, an
: expression?
It's a term.
: Could you say things like:
:
: foo(...);
Yes.
: (Admittedly I have no idea what that would mean) Is it just something
: that does nothing?
Nope, it issues a warning (or maybe an exception) if you try to execute it.
It's basically for stubbing things out when you're doing rapid prototyping,
but that's kind of what is happening with forward declarations as well.
: sub f() {
: print "Don't see me\n";
: }
: sub f() {
: # do other stuff
: }
: f;
:
: Would do the same as using ... in the former? I hope not (though I
: suppose that's what Perl 5 does). Is it more special than that?
Well, redefining a function with {...} certainly shouldn't produce a
warning about redefinition. Other than that, it should act similarly.
I was only half joking when I said we might have !!! and ??? as well.
Maybe ??? never complains and !!! always throws an exception. Except
then everyone will be declaring their functions using !!! instead of ... .
Maybe !!! is the "okay" one, and ??? is warns, and ... is fatal.
But it seems mnemonic to identify !!! with $!, and ??? with something
that is questionable. That would make ... a no-op.
But maybe we just stick with ... and make its behavior pragmatically
controllable.
Larry
