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Postings from May 2007
Re: Is Perl 6 too late?
From:
chromatic
Date:
May 13, 2007 19:48
Subject:
Re: Is Perl 6 too late?
Message ID:
200705131946.18761.chromatic@wgz.org
On Sunday 13 May 2007 15:42:30 Thomas Wittek wrote:
> What makes Perl hard to read is the excessive use of special characters
> (/\W/).
It also makes Mandarin and other ideographic languages impossible to read. As
evidence I admit that, though I am very smart, *I* can't read them.
(Try to ignore the billion-plus people who can.)
> Global variables with cryptic names, that no beginner can make any sense
> of by reading it. And after not working with "$<" for some months I
> can't remember it either, although I've got quite some Perl experience.
Most of those have gone away.
> Additionally I'm not a friend of sigils:
I'm not a friend of potential conflicts between built-in operators and my
identifier names (and especially the conflicts between scalar, aggregate,
type, and function names).
> I would also like semicolons to be optional. There are far more cases of
> single line statements than multiline statements. So you would save
> quite some characters, when the semicolon would be optional and you
> could concatenate multiline statements with e.g. a backslash.
When (smart) people talk about Python's whitespace problem, they don't mean
*horizontal* whitespace.
> Some say that there are too much operators in Perl(6). I partially
> agree.
That's like saying there are too many function calls in Scheme. Perl's an
operator-oriented language!
> People not only want code that _is_ sexy, but they also want it to
> _look_ sexy.
You'll have to find me more than a handful of Dylan hackers to start to
convince me of that!
-- c