$arr[-1]. Perl6: @arr[*-1] ughhh! I don't mind the '@' sigil; that change makes sense. But '*' in the index *-1 doesn't make sense on the face of it.Why such a change? I didn't look deeper. It is such a non-intuitive change to such a common idiom.
Another seemingly unnecessary change: inline comments. The code goes
$x = 1 #`(add one) + 1;. Why would I want to do that? In the 2+ decades I have been coding Perl professionally, I have never felt the need for inline comments. How does that help? How doesn't that obfusicate code?Perl has a bad rep for being indistinguishable from line noise (or a cat walking on your keyboard). These two changes jumped out at me. They messed with the simple idiom for accessing the last n'th element of an array and added an unnecessary "inline comment" syntax that looks like more gobbleygook.
Supposedly, part of the design goals of perl6 was to make common things easier. So we have
$obj.method() instead of $obj->method(); ok fine. And we have '$' for scalars always; '@' for arrays; and '%' for hashes to denote type rather than context. But what is that star '*' doing in the index of the array.I was looking forward to Grammers as a very powerful tool. Talk about a text munging chainsaw! But some of these other changes are making perl6 very un-perl. Or rather, making perl6 indulge in the worst parts of old perl.
I haven't been paying much attention to perl since 5.8.1 . I hope someone has backported some Grammer-like construct it that is the case, then screw perl6!
No comments:
Post a Comment