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Postings from June 2022
> On Jun 7, 2022, at 10:19, Dave Mitchell <davem@iabyn.com> wrote: > > 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. This remains my own sense, too: the gains in concision this would facilitate don’t justify the addition of yet another syntactic variant to a language that already maintains an overabundance of such. -FThread Previous | Thread Next