Re: A shorter long dot

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From:

Damian Conway

Date:

April 29, 2006 16:50

Subject:

Re: A shorter long dot

Message ID:

4453FB99.5080408@conway.org

Juerd wrote:

> Audrey cleverly suggested that changing the second character would also
> work, and that has many more glyphs available. So she came up with
> 
>> and propose ".:" as a solution

>     $xyzzy.:foo();
>     $fooz. :foo();
>     $foo.  :foo();

This would make the enormous semantic difference between:

        foo. :bar()

and:

        foo  :bar()

depend on a visual difference of about four pixels. :-(

We've strived to eliminate homonyms from Perl 6. I'd much rather not introduce 
one at this late stage.

For similar reasons, I'm strongly opposed to:

       foo. ?bar()
       foo. +bar()
       foo. *bar()

since they're highly misleading if you happen to miss the dot.

Damian


PS: While I can understand the appeal to laziness, I'm not at all convinced
     by the argument:

     > And it's a lot of work (many, many keystrokes!)
     > to go back and change something.

     In vim, the exact number of keystrokes to realign the long dots of N lines
     is 7+N. And, if I found myself doing that regularly, I'd turn it into a
     macro and bind it to a key, so the number of keystrokes would be one.

     We need to be careful not to require the language to solve problems that
     are better solved with tools.

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