in reply to use feature 'postderef'; # Postfix Dereference Syntax is coming in 5.20

I don't think this is a good syntax. I would humbly suggest a better syntax is actually a new operator. Something like this:

my @array \= $arrayref;

This would be the exact opposite of what happens when you reverse the order of the = and \. I.e. you can already

my @array =\$arrayref;

This would just reverse the process.

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Re^2: use feature 'postderef'; # Postfix Dereference Syntax is coming in 5.20
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2013 at 08:17 UTC

    I don't think this is a good syntax. I would humbly suggest a better syntax is actually a new operator. Something like this:

    But that does so much less than the proposed syntax, also it confuses assignment with dereferencing (dereferencing doesn't imply assignment)

[reply]

      Ok, this is a fair concern. The question is what sort of syntax would work when, say, passing in an argument to a function. One could have implicit assignments in a unitary left hand operator for example, something like:

      my $foo = somefunc(\= $bar);

      This would be contextually equivalent to %$bar or @$bar depending on what $bar references. The idea would be it means "what ___ references" and that gets coerced into a list or array after that point. Of course in this context, it would be coerced into a list (of possibly only one value)...

      In short if the \= operator was overloaded so that it could be either binary or unitary (left-hand), then the problem goes away.

[reply]
[d/l]

        In short if the \= operator was overloaded so that it could be either binary or unitary (left-hand), then the problem goes away.

        An even worse idea :)

[reply]

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