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Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Dot

by nysus (Parson)
on Jul 15, 2001 at 23:13 UTC ( [id://96883]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Dot
in thread Dots and cargo-cult programming

I belive the real source of the problem is the lack of non-alphanumeric symbols in ASCII. We all know Wall was pretty meticulous picking right symbols. So how on earth did he arrive at "." for concatenation? As you say, "." is pretty universal for "stop". Personally, I think "." and "->" both suck for different reasons. It's a choice between a lesser of two evils and there ain't much you can do about it.

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Re: Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Dot
by frag (Hermit) on Jul 16, 2001 at 01:28 UTC
    That's a good point. I'm so used to it by now that I haven't considered how weird it is to use '.' as concat. I think it's because I've grown to think of the Perl5 dot as like a decimal point, in that the two parts of the number have to be adjacent to each other.

    -- Frag.

Re: Re: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Dot
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jul 17, 2001 at 03:11 UTC
    Yes, so many things we think of as normal now were caused by a lack of characters in ASCII and its predicesors. Why not use × for multiplication and ÷ for division, since they are in the common Latin-1 8-bit character set? I mean, isn't it time we moved beyond 7 bits?

    Now we think of * as meaning multiply, when originally it was an available substitute because character 0xD7 didn't exist yet.

    You could also use → for dereference and ← for assignment (as early Algol-family languages originally wanted!), if only the fonts weren't drawn so terribly.

    —John

    Hmm... I know that's worked before, so why are characters with high bit set (multi-byte in UTF-8 encoding) showing up as sequences in the preview window? Looking at HTML source, there is no meta tag for charset present. Works fine as entities, though, but much harder to type!

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