On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 14:23 +0000, Peter Scott wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:35:50 +0100, Carl Mäsak wrote:
> > I'm trying to explain to myself why I don't like this idea at all. I'm
> > only partially successful. Other people seem to have no problem with it,
> > so I might just be wrong, or part of a very small, ignorable minority.
> > :) 
> 
> I find myself echoing you.  I don't have the language design skills others 
> are displaying here.  I can only evaluate this from an educator's point of 
> view and say that the P5 syntax of
> 
>     is $x, 42, 'Got The Answer';
> 
> is just about the conceivable pinnacle of elegance for at least that form 
> of question.  (Compare, e.g., the logorrhoea of Java tests.)  I do not see 
> how I could tell a student with a straight face that the P6 proposal is an 
> improvement, at which point the conversation would devolve into a 
> defensive argument I do not want to have.
> 
> I get that 'is' is already taken and we do not want the grammar to engage 
> in Clintonesque parsing when it encounters the token.  Okay.  But how do I 
> justify the new syntax to a student?  What are they getting that makes up 
> for what looks like a fall in readability?

I don't quite understand the problem with using the same syntax as in
Perl 5, just uppercasing the verbs so they won't conflict with everyday
syntactic features:

    OK($bool,  'Widget claimed success');
    IS($x, 42, 'Widget produced the right answer');

(This is ignoring issues of placement of parens or curlies to make the
Perl 6 syntax attractive and consistent with other constructs -- I'm
just talking about using verb rather than adverb syntax, with our
already properly Huffmanized verb names intact.)

I do like the idea of having TEST {} blocks that go inactive when not in
testing mode (however that is defined).  But other than that, I don't
understand the value of the other syntactic changes suggested, the
adverb syntax in particular.  Maybe I'm missing something obvious ....


-'f


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