I'm going to YAPC

[Darren Duncan]

On 2013.05.30 8:03 PM, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:58 PM, Reini Urban <reini.urban at gmail.com> wrote:
>     What?
>     And I seriously thought of proposing making the scalar $ sigil optional.
>     It looks bad and is only needed within strings. functions are scalars also,
>     so treat them as such.
>     Bleach the beast. ruby had a point.
>
>     if (b) { a = 12 }
>     elsif (b) { a = 14 }
>     else { a = sub{ 1 } }
>     print a;
>
> A sigil-free mutation of Perl would be a good language, to be sure.  Perhaps not
> really Perl, but still good.  :)  But as I'm sure you'll agree, it's easy to
> mechanically translate between the two dialects, which renders it fundamentally
> uninteresting to VM hackers.  And as such I hope never to have to talk about it
> in Austin.

I think if you were going to make a Perl-like language that is sigil-free, where 
sigils aren't used to indicate that what it appears with is the name of some 
entity in contrast to a keyword or literal, I agree.  My preference instead is 
to let bare symbolic characters generally be parsed as operators, so for example 
a "$foo" means "$" is a unary operator whose argument is "foo", like how "-foo" 
is treated (or its an infix depending on context, again like "-"), and likewise 
for % and @ etc.  In the same context I'd prefer # to be freed up from being a 
comment marker and useable as an operator like other symbols, so for example one 
can declare unary "#" so eg "#ary" returns the count of elements in "ary".  I 
like "/* */" for comments as one is unlikely to want an operator like that while 
I can see a lot of desire for "#" as an operator.  So this wouldn't necessarily 
be Perl anymore, but I do that in my Perl-alike language. -- Darren Duncan