matt

If we want to make Perl more attractive for people from OTHER languages, we need to compromise. Many other languages use the obj.method syntax, so why shouldn't Perl? The reason Perl doesn't is because we never had objects until recently, and we've had string concatenation for a long long time.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

The dot operator

I used to think that replacing -> with . sucked big time, until I read Piers Cawley's article about Perl 6. Now I have learned to stop worrying and love the dot. It's sort of like Visual Basic's with block. Instead of

   $self->{foo} = $self->bar ? 10 : $self->rat * 10;
[download]

one instead writes

   $.foo = .bar ? 10 : .rat * 10;
[download]

Although IIRC, that should be ?? and :: for the ternary conditional operator. Such considerations aside, the succinctness of the dot approach far outweighs the arrow approach (which, it should be remembered, was itself a vast improvement over the apostrophe operator). Your surely agree with me when I say

   $->foo = ->bar ? 10 : ->rat * 10;
[download]

looks... odd. That's reason enough for me to go with the dot approach.

The underscore operator

I do think that requiring whitespace around the underscore operator is a bit of a design wart caused by exhaustion of the ASCII character set. Which means that there's not a lot you can do about it.

In a Unicode environment, I imagine it would be preferable to define a specific operator that doesn't require whitespace disambiguation. I think a small ring character like on a Swedish A would be pretty cool. But if you're not Unicode pure then I guess you're out of luck.

--

g r i n d e r

The case of the underscore operator is not the first time Perl has been dependent on whitespace, by the way. And I like it, too -- you should notice that the underscore acts like a line connecting its two operands. Connecting... concatenating... something like that.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;