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Postings from January 2002
I was reading Apocalypse 4 and was perturbed by the strange and inconsistent looking use of UPPER and lower case in various keywords. Now before anyone rushes to assist me in understanding the logic, I should say that we've already thrashed this out on the London.pm mailing list and several people (Hi Piers :-) have re-iterated the reasoning being the use of upper vs lower case. In a nutshell, UPPER CASE is reserved for special Perl blocks that should stand out to the user due to the fact that they represent exception flow control. It's a good, logical and consistent argument for sure, but sorry, I don't buy it. We end up with peculiarities like 'try/CATCH'. Even if 'try' is a keyword and 'CATCH' is a special block, I can't see any valid reason for having them different case. Same with 'last/NEXT' - they're so similar in concept that the implementation details should not matter. By this argument, I could claim that the correct capitalisation of "knife and FORK" is based on the rule "cutting things are in lower case, spiking things are in UPPER CASE". It's consistent and logical, but common sense should tell you that it's plain wrong. INIT, DESTROY, AUTOLOAD, etc., all make sense to me. They really are special blocks that normally only occur once in a file. But CATCH and NEXT are part of normal syntax. I don't think they're any more "unusual" in their flow control than try, while, loop or foreach. I think this needs a rethink. What do other people think? AThread Next