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Postings from September 2000
Ilya Zakharevich wrote: > Are you trying to convince me/us that is going to be used often? > Yes, I am. You made the unsupported statement that array operations are rarely used. I'm suggesting otherwise (although to say that they're rarely used in Perl 5 is a tautology, of course!). > > Array notation is not 'rarely used' in languages that support it--in fact, > > operations are applied to arrays and lists at least as often as scalars in > > most code I see written for Mathematica, J, PDL, and so forth. > > a) You can *already* use vectors as scalars in Perl; That's not what RFC 82 is proposing. > b) What we are discussing is Perl, not Mathematica, J, PDL, and so > forth. These languages have a very narrow niche. That's because few such languages provide strong general purpose programming features as well. They are either limited maths-oriented languages (like Mathematica) or add-ons to general purpose languages that aren't fully integrated (Python/NumPy; Perl/PDL; C++/Blitz++). Many Perl users operate on lists of data. Requiring explicit loops every time a programmer wants to operate on a list is asking the programmer to fit in with how a computer thinks. That's not right.Thread Previous | Thread Next