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Postings from June 2022
On Tue, May 31, 2022 at 08:40:52AM +0100, Neil Bowers wrote:
> In early March last year, I proposed[1] new syntax for "quote words arrayref",
> so that the following:
>
> $a = [qw/ a b c /];
>
> could be replaced with:
>
> $a = qa[ a b c ];
My personal feeling is that that it adds complexity for very little gain.
If people want an array ref they just wrap the qw() in []'s. It's visually
obvious then that an array ref is being created.
With qa() you now require programmers to remember another fact. Each
little fact on its own isn't a great burden, but perl has accumulated
zillions of such factlets, which cummulatively make perl hard to use.
Now you will have things like
foo(qw(a b c));
foo(qa(a b c));
doing two completely different things, and the programmer may get confused.
People already find qw() confusing enough - e.g. whether it parses commas;
now they will have to remember whether qa() obeys the same parsing rules
as qw(). Etc.
--
Modern art:
"That's easy, I could have done that!"
"Ah, but you didn't!"
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