> -----Original Message-----
> From: Juerd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, 15 April, 2004 05:09 PM
> To: Dave Mitchell
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: backticks
>
>
> Dave Mitchell skribis 2004-04-15 21:56 (+0100):
> > If hypothetically we *are* going to have a simplfied constant-index hash
> > access syntax, is there any reason why we can't use a single quote (')
> > rather than backtick ('), akin to the Perl4-ish package separator,
> > ie %foo'bar rather than %foo`bar?
>
> Yes, there is one. It is a problem that the Perl4-ish package separator
> causes in Perl 5 already. One that bites many coders:
>
> "Eat at $joe's"
>
> means in Perl 5:
>
> "Eat at $joe::s"
>
> would mean in Perl 6 if we used the ' for hash subscripts:
>
> "Eat at $joe{'s'}"
>
> Apostrophes are needed in text. Many languages use them to mark the
> absence of some letters. I don't know of any such use of the backtick,
> except by people new to computers who use them as if they are
> apostrophes :)
>
> I dislike the attempt at getting balanced quotes in ASCII that involves
> ` and ', but it shouldn't be a problem as that in normal use always
> follows whitespace or at least interpunction.
If we're going to entertain alternatives, why not use % as the hash
subscriptor?
To borrow from another thread:
%foo%monday%food = 10;
%foo%monday%travel = 100;
%foo%tuesday%food = 10;
%foo%tuesday%travel = 150;
This has the advantage of ensuring that the hash-marker [1] appears in every
hash reference, and doubles up on the "path weight" of a single character,
for really good Huffman.
I'm not so much of a user of the modulus operation that I'm unwilling to
exchange it for, e.g. C<mod> or C<+%>.
I don't know about other conflicting uses of %, especially involving special
no-comma-required rules, but I'll bet that if there was one such, a
whitespace rule would disambiguate it.
(E.g., %functions{'print'} %handles{'stderr'}, ...)
I doubt if this would work quite as well in p5, though, since the
presumption of % isn't so high.
=Austin
[1] The "hash marker", for allegorical reasons, really should be either '#'
(Unix) or '-' (American Football). I wonder if it's too late to reclaim '#'.
Perhaps % could indicate comments... :-) :-) :-)
