Phoenix.pm: quoting constant hash keys survey

[Michael Friedman]

Scott,

Not knowing anything about the other uses of ` and << >> except for 
what's passed through the list lately, I'd vote against using backtick 
in this instance. For one thing, it'll throw my editor's syntax 
coloring off, because it assumes that you'll always have a matched 
pair. :-)

In general, though, I'm with the group that says "there's nothing wrong 
with being verbose". I'd rather have a clear %foo{bar()} and 
%foo{'bar'} which fit my existing ideas of programming syntax* than 
something involving single quote marks.

But, TMTOWTDI, and since I'll never use the single backtick in any 
related context, it really doesn't matter for my personal coding.

Thanks for asking around, though!
-- Mike

* You know, the things that make all languages 'readable' by anyone 
with a solid programming background -- things in quotes are strings, 
parens mark functions, == vs. =, etc. Perl goes quite far in stretching 
that pardigm, as it probably should, given its background as an ad hoc 
scripting language, but so far it's still very readable to C, Java, or 
even VB programmers. And I thought Perl 6 was supposed to become *more* 
"standard" in syntax, with using . for method calls instead of ->, but 
maybe that's gone by the wayside now.


On Apr 16, 2004, at 6:30 PM, Scott Walters wrote:

> Tick, `, was selected because it doesn't currently have any meaning in 
> that
> context - %foo `ls` isn't valid Perl. Other characters that also don't 
> have an
> operator state meaning were rejected for other reasons.
>
> So, the survey question is, should this meaning of ` be or not be 
> included
> in Perl 6?
>
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Michael Friedman                  HighWire Press, Stanford Southwest
Phone: 480-456-0880                                   Tempe, Arizona
FAX:   270-721-8034                  <friedman at highwire.stanford.edu>
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