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in reply to Re^8: What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff
in thread What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff

As for soft-semicolon you completly misunderstood the situation: First, nobody force you to use this pragma. And if you do not use it you are not affected. I am thinking now that it should be enabled only with option -d.

In the OP you make no mention of a pragma in proposal 1, you just say that it would be "highly desirable" to have soft semicolons. This implies that you would like it to be the default behaviour in Perl 7, which, judging by the responses, would hack a lot of people off, me included. If you are proposing that soft semicolons are only enabled via a pragma perhaps you should add a note to that effect in the OP, being sure to make it clear that it is an update rather than silently changing the text.

And IMHO there is not a zero subset of Perl users who would be interested in this capability. Especially system administrators who systematically use bash along with Perl.

I spent the last 26 years of my career as a systems administrator (I had no ambition to leave technical work and become a manager) on Unix/Linux systems and started using Perl in that role in 1994 with perl 4.036, quickly moving to 5. The lack of semicolon statement terminators in the various shell programming languages I had to use was a pain in the arse and moving to Perl was a huge relief as well as a boost to effectiveness. I would not be the slightest bit interested in soft semicolons and they would, to my mind, be either a debugging nightmare or would force me into a coding style alien to my usual practice.

In this post you say

Also Python-inspired fascination with eliminating all brackets does not do here any good

1 2 $a=$b=1; 3 $x=1 if $a==1 4 && $b=2;

should generally be written

2 $a=$b=1; 3 $x=1 if( $a==1 4 && $b=2);

to which I say, nonsense! Why add unnecessary round brackets to perfectly valid code? Use round brackets where they are needed to disambiguate precedence but not where they just add superfluous noise. Nothing to do with fascination, I've never touched Python!

You should be commended on the amount of thought that you have put into your proposals and such efforts should not be discouraged. It is unfortunate that your first proposal has been the most contentious and the one that most responses have latched onto. Sticking to one's guns is also a praiseworthy trait but doing so in the face of several powerful and cogent arguments to the contrary from experienced Perl users is perhaps taking it too far. Making it clear that soft semicolons would not be the default behaviour might apply some soothing balm to this thread.

Cheers,

JohnGG