Hi monks,

Maybe I'm used to Perl in respect to $ for scalars, @ for arrays and % for hashes.

I'm reading up on PHP and I come across code such as:

while($element = each ($fruit)) {
  echo $element['key'];
  echo '-';
  echo $element['value'];
  echo '<br />';
}
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which is equivalent to Perl's

while (($key, $value) = each (%fruit) {
  print $key;
  print '-';
  priint $value;
  print '<br />';
}
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When I read Perl code, the % immediately tells me that I'm looking an associative array. In contrast, all variables in PHP are prefixed with $, which I find rather unhelpful.

If I'm not wrong, Ruby has none of those and I imagine that it must be a lot more cryptic, because the variables can read like function words:

for x in 0...c.length do print c[x], " " end
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Which are the variables and which are the function words?

What are your views?