in reply to Consistency, syntax, and little minds

I suggest that where an array or hash is to be modified a reference should be passed.
my @foo = (1, 2, 3);
\@foo = (1, 2, 3);   # ?
\@foo = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; # ??

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Too much "consistency", I fear.

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Re: Re: Consistency, syntax, and little minds
by belg4mit (Prior) on Oct 02, 2002 at 21:06 UTC
    What? No, not at all. Neither of your "?" constructs would exist. In both those cases you are defining the list, and in neither case is a function being called to act upon a named list.

    --
    perl -wpe "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

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      Ahh, I see. You and I mean different things by the word defining. I use it as a synonym for "declaring", while you are using it as a synonym for "assigning to".

      I also disagree that there's no modification of an array happening. @foo is indeed a name, and the data structure to which it refers is indeed being modified.

      Regardless, you're still trying to solve the problem for which prototypes already exist. If you don't like them, that's fine, but you might as well argue that all instances of push can be replaced by: 

      @foo = (@foo, 'extra element');

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      Proposing a backwards-incompatible modification to the core of Perl to remove a parser exception intended to make everyone's life a little easier for the sake of more explicit knowing what-goes-on-under-the-covers-consistency is, in my opinion, a mistake. Doubly so since you have access to a mechanism which gives you nearly the same power.

      Update: It also occurs to me that it's inconsistent to say that in-place use of an aggregate automatically expands. How would one explain that "This single name refers to a bunch of things, but it's always a bunch of things in an uncollected sense when it's referred to with the name, but when it's referred to with the name and another token, it's the collected bunch of things."

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