On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Larry Wall wrote:
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 06:43:05PM +0000, Herbert Snorrason wrote:
: This whole issue kind of makes me go 'ugh'. One of the things I like
: best about Perl is the amazing simplicity of the <> input construct.
Hmm.
while (<>) {...}
for .lines {...}
Looks like a wash to me.
Partly it does. The point is that not only the <> is simple, but that it
is also visually distinctive, which is important IMHO.
Obviously the new proposal of unary C<=> is just as good from this point
of view...
: Replacing that with something that not only is object oriented, but on
: top of that also LOOKS object oriented is bound to be a loss. It's
: going to be that bit longer to write, and not the least bit easier to
: understand.
Really? I dare you to show those two lines to any random
computer-literate but non-Perl-speaking stranger and see which one
they understand better.
Of course they'd understand better the latter, but I think that there's a
limit to non-Perl-speaking-people-friendship. After all this may be useful
for learning perl, but learning it to a good degree would always involve
getting acquainted with quite a lot of typical idioms, so this does not
make much of a point IMHO, provided that when a typical user becomes
familiar with those idioms he can perceive (i) how good they look in
source code (ii) how useful they result in practice.
It's all cargo cult at that level anyway, so whether it looks OO or not
is really completely immaterial to its usability.
Indeed it's not *purely* a matter of "looking OO", but of "looking yet
another more-or-less alphabetic string" (yes, even with a prepended point:
it's just not as markedly distinctive!). As I said, <> is deeply etched in
Perl programmers' cortex as an input operator. In other words it may well
be cargo cult, but not in a totally negative acceptation: I mean... till
it works, and works well as it currently does!
And I don't buy the nuclear blackmail argument either. I'll start
worrying about people switching to Python and Ruby when those languages
get a clue about how natural languages work. As far as I know, there's
OTOH, as a side note, but not a totally unrelated one, I guess, one should
pay some attention not to exaggerate following natural languages
principles in designing programming languages: granted, I appreciate their
pervasiveness in (current) perl and indeed probably this is one of the
reasons I love it. But I think that there are some natural limits to this
as well: AFAIK any attempt to overcome them was basically a failure. We
want the *right* mixture of conciseness, intutivity, clarity instead. In
this sense a construct like
while (<>) {
...
}
really doesn't resamble any natural language construct as far as I can
see, but indeed it's an idiom that perl programmers easily become familiar
with and like to use... well, I think so!
Michele
--
I hold a square measuring 10x10 metres away from a person who is standing
100 metres away.
I ask them to shoot the square with a high-accuracy gun.
Don't stand there holding the square when they are shooting...
- Robert Israel in sci.math, "Re: Scaling"
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