You say 'we'. Does that mean that you're involved with Perl developement?
Eh? No, I'm only involved in the design. I delegate the development to competent people.
Anyhow, what odes Huffman coding mean?
Huffman coding is a compression algorithm that uses letter frequencies to turn frequent characters into a short number of bits and infrequent characters into a longer number of bits. As a compression algoritm, it's not all that great, but we've generalized the concept to mean any conscious tradeoff between the length of a construct and its frequency of use. It's a very important design criterion for computer languages. It's just another version of "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." In this case we apply it to the desirable length of tokens in the language. Similar reasoning went into lengthening the bitwise operators for Perl 6, but shortening the junctional ones in their place. We felt that junctional operators were going to be more important than bitwise operators in general, unless you're writing device drivers.
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