The first part of your idea is good... will have to see how I can do that considering perl won't build on my machine (the DB stuff doesn't pass)...
The 2nd part... I'm not welcome on the P5P list. Their comments are that while I may be polite, I don't say things they find pleasant. Unfortunately, they prefer pollyannaish pleasantries over factual discourse. Some things are difficult if not impossible to make 'pleasant' and as an engineer and scientist, I tend to look at why things are the way they are and look for how to make them better -- not accepting the status quo, because I know it isn't good enough -- that makes me oh, so popular. It's not that what has come before was bad.. it's that it can be better, with almost everything having been built on that which came before.
But some take the attitude that what came before is perfect as it is, which shows what? If it was perfect as it is, everyone would flock to "it" (whatever it is) or it would make everyone's life easier.
One thing I don't like about perl is all the damn sigils. There are MANY places where they are redundant. So why require require them? I would NOT say prohibit them, -- as there are many places where you may have the same named variable/subs and the sigil is the only thing differentiating them. But if you only have 1 type of a name, say a scalar 'x', why not just say x=1?, or if I say
carton2=1, isn't is clear from the context that carton must be an array?
Those are other examples where something could be meaningful syntax, that makes unequivocal and unique sense that for no reason other than "the rules" has been declared illegal syntax. It can't be incompatible with
past programs -- like the suggested change of this base-subject, because it is *illegal* syntax under the current perl.
If we took all the cases of illegal syntax and put them to use *where it made sense*, we'd end up with a more powerful language "for free"... It would still run the old
perl5 programs, but allow for a whole new set of expressions that take less work to express.
If you read any articles on language design (like the one I've quoted and linked to earlier in this conversation), you'll quickly see that *conciseness* is directly proportional to power in a language. The fewer characters (even by 2 parenthesis), that you can say something, the more powerful the language is and the easier it is for people to express ideas in it.
It's the same in spoken language. If there is no word for an idea, it is hard to talk about it ... you can create sentences or paragraphs to describe or talk around it, but until you have a work for an idea, it's hard to grasp onto. The fewer symbols needed to describe an idea, the easier it is to get across meaning.
As for the p5p list.... I told a story from a driver's ed class about someone who grew up in an area and didn't want to change -- while the world changed around him and how it, in the limit could even cause fatal results. The p5p found that story so offensive, they kicked me off the list. Now I know the story wasn't inherently offensive -- it was told to a public audience in a public class and no one was offended, but in the p5p bunch, they took it as some indictment worth of excising me from the list. Go figger. I figured, if it wasn't that it would be how I styled my hair - - they were just looking for a reason -- any reason would do. Recently they had a fit because of a reply in kind to a trite closing of one of my bugs. Yet if you read what I wrote, the reaction was WAY over the top.
It's clear there isn't much I can say that isn't colored and taken a certain way -- look at how this question started off -- one of the first replies, "G'day", accused me of lying as to my reasons for wanting this change. That I'd made a coding error and wanted to change perl because of it. I've been coding in perl for over 20 years.
_EVEN_ if I made such a mistake after 20 years of doing this (which I didn't, I want'ed to get rid of the parens), don't I have the right, to ask why it is that way and why it couldn't be better? If it could, why do others take such a negative attitude toward improvement?
At least you have the positive idea of making the changes and running the tests... which is a huge leap above most other replies -- yours is practical and concrete. For that I thank you. (Despite the difficulties I may have in implementing the ideas--;-)).