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Postings from May 2007
Re: Is Perl 6 too late?
From:
Jonathan Scott Duff
Date:
May 14, 2007 17:26
Subject:
Re: Is Perl 6 too late?
Message ID:
b762bfda0705140611r412ce6efo3289cd0ee5e7dedf@mail.gmail.com
On 5/14/07, Thomas Wittek <mail@gedankenkonstrukt.de> wrote:
>
> Moritz Lenz schrieb:
> >> What makes Perl hard to read is the excessive use of special characters
> >> (/\W/).
> >
> > I disagree: The make it look ugly, but not hard to read.
>
> Even if it's "only" ugly: To what advantage? I don't think ugliness is a
> good characteristic of a programming language.
Some people consider mathematics ugly too, but expressivity for
mathematicians is valued more over general readability. So too in perl.
(This is related to "learn once, use often")
>> Additionally I'm not a friend of sigils:
> >
> > Then you shouldn't program in perl. Really.
>
> Reason? I still haven't seen a good justification for sigils.
Whether you like it or not, sigils are a part of Perl's personality that
aren't going away any time soon. If you don't like them, then you shouldn't
use perl. All those people claiming that Perl 6 isn't Perl would be on the
money if Perl 6 didn't have sigils.
To allow arrays and scalars and subs to have the same name (besides the
> sigil) although they have different content? No good idea I think.
> I also can't remember that I ever named a variable like a "reserved
> word" or operator. And even if I could, I'd consider it to be bad style.
I think of it more like hungarian notation. The sigils enable a default set
of expectations. "Oh, I see an @, so this thing must be an array". Perl 6
has changed the meaning behind the notation ever so slightly, but the
utility is still there.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
perlpilot@gmail.com