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Postings from August 2013
Aaron Priven wrote:
>Then whatever you had in $foo, it could be dereferenced, into whatever
>it is -- scalar, hash, array, glob, etc. There's no ambiguity there,
>is there?
There are two kinds of ambiguity that that would cause. Firstly,
overloading of operators @{}, %{}, et al, mean that a single reference
can indeed be dereferenced in multiple ways. Secondly, the semantics
of several operators depends on *compile-time* knowledge of the type
of an operand, but your proposed dereference-to-anything operator means
that the resulting type isn't known until runtime. A dereference-to-any
operand either (sane version) would not be eligible for use with operators
requiring an array/hash/whatever, or (insane version) would require many
new op types to be added that defer to runtime the decisions that are
currently made at compile time.
It's all the same problem we ran into with auto-dereferencing "keys $r".
-zefram
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