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Postings from December 2004
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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