On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 03:25:17PM -0400, John Siracusa wrote:
: On 7/21/05, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: > Have at it...
:
: The only thing I immediately don't like is the use of the normal identifier
: character "_" to indicate the "specialness" of a particular variable (or
: attribute or whatever we're calling them these days). IMO, a "_" should
: just be a "_" no matter where it occurs. Making a leading "_" mean
: something special (triggering a slew of new semantics) in a particular
: context seems a bit hacky to me.
:
: Damian may not like the colon, but I couldn't help thinking that the "_"
: could be replaced with ":" and things would be cleaner. Example:
Well, but the _ really is part of the name, insofar as it's trying to
isolate the namespace. Even with : we had to say that it would probably
be stored in the symbol table with the leading colon. Plus history is
on the side of leading _ meaning "private implementation detail", and
the : is awfully confusing in the neighborhood of adverb pairs. If it
were just sigiled variables, the : would probably be fine, but
method :foo() {...}
just has a strangeness to it that won't go away. Arguably that's a feature,
but I'm mostly worried with visual confusion with all the other colons
in Perl 6.
Plus, the leading underscore would only be magical on attributes and
methods, I suspect.
Larry
