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Postings from November 2010
I've generally been fairly quiet on this thread, mostly thanks to
an...ambitious work travel schedule, though I've been trying to
keep an eye on the discussion.
I'm pleased that I don't see a whole lot of opposition to the concept of
defined-dereference, just a whole lot of discussion around the right
syntax for the feature.
Initially, I was fairly opposed to &&-> for the same reason I don't
like ~> -- It makes it quite hard to read a chunk of code:
if ($foo&&->{bar}&&->baz(23)&&->{biff} && $thing->true)
All I saw was a sea of ampersands.
I've popped up on #p5p a few times to talk about the then-current state
of syntax proposals. One of my favorites was -&>
if ($foo-&>{bar}-&>baz(23)-&>{biff} && $thing->true)
While Perl 5 and Perl 6 have diverged somewhat in terms of method call
syntax, I decided that this might be a good time to use a
phone-a-friend.
Larry explained to me that Perl 6's .? is probably the closest relation
to the feature we're now mooting. P6 has other methods for "call all
of" -- also inspired by regexy syntax.
if ($foo->?{bar}->?baz(23)->?{biff} && $thing->true)
The recommended "->?" wasn't initially my top choice for the feature
in question, but between "match 0 or 1 times, like a regex" and that it
looks a bit like half of a ternary operator[1], it's definitely _become_
my top choice.
I'd like to focus this discussion somewhat narrowly for a bit:
Why _shouldn't_ we bless ->? as the correct syntax for "defined/safe
dereference"?
Best,
- Jesse
[1] And yes, only the left half of a ternary operator. If anyone wants
to know where the colon went, well, Larry got it.
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