Hi

I'm meditating if Perl should introduce an explicit keyword size (or count ¹) always return the number of elements of lists and arrays... (length is already taken and scalar is to overloaden)

so 

size @a := scalar @a;

[download]

and

size (a..c) := scalar @{[a..c]}

[download]

I know "explicit is better than implicit" is more a Python dogma, but since even popes still fall into the scalar trap we should maybe consider "another way to do it" (best Perl tradition =).

Cheers Rolf

PS: I tried to provide an example implementation of size, something like

sub size([@$];@) {
...
}

[download]

but was to lazy to fiddle around with prototypes.

Anyway IMHO a reliable implementation will need more parsing magic than prototypes can bring to avoid disambiguation.

¹) or whatever

In reply to new keyword "size" to avoid scalar trap ? ( scalar @array != scalar(LIST) ) by LanX

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