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Postings from July 2021
no sigils; x = (0, 0); y = 1; z = (x, y); # z is (0, 0, 1) Your sigil free version is much easier to understand! On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM John Ankarström <john@ankarstrom.se> wrote: > Den 2021-05-23 kl. 21:33 skrev L A Walsh: > > 2) Going 'unnecessary-sigil' optional. > > You've clearly put some thought into this, and there's nothing on face > value that I would regard as impossible in your proposal. > > That said, I don't see it ever being enabled by default in any version > of Perl for a couple of reasons: > > 1. It feels "unperlish". > > 2. It seems to admit that sigils were a bad idea from the beginning. > I don't think everyone agrees about that. I don't think I personally do. > > 3. Many parts of Perl have been designed with the assumption that > variables have sigils. For example, let's assume that Perl never had > sigils. If that had been the case, I would doubt that lists would act > the way they do in Perl. > > This > > x = (0, 0); > y = 1; > z = (x, y); # z is (0, 0, 1) > > just doesn't seem intuitive to me, and I suspect that it would trip up > most people, just like the UNIX shell's word splitting does. > > Once you add sigils, however: > > @x = (0, 0); > $y = 1; > @z = (@x, $y); # @z is (0, 0, 1) > > ... the intention is much more clear and the automatic list flattening > is no longer a foot gun; instead, it becomes a very useful feature. > > In summary, sigils likely make a lot of useful Perl syntax possible -- > syntax that would be hard to remove from Perl without transforming it > into an entirely different language. > >