(I moved this to meditations)

First of all your wording is dubious, (type)globs are only used with our package variables. Private variables with my don't have any type-globs. (which leads to some break in orthogonality)

The origin of type-globs (i.e. "things" with sigil * ) lies IMHO in Lisp, which has similar Symbol Tables.

Obviously it's possible to have separated name-spaces with sigils.

So are you asking to abandon sigils?

It's true that many think that using the same name aka symbol for different types is bad style.

But I see no way to stop using sigils in Perl, since all the context mechanics would stop working.

Any changes on that level would lead to a Perl6'ish compatibility mess (well probably even worse).

And * is needed for exporting functions into other namespaces.

HTH! :)

PS: Though I could imagine a pragma which automatically declares $xxx = \@xxx after a my @xxx (analogous for $yyy = \%yyy ), this would facilitate reference mechanics a lot. This pragma would automatically forbid name reusing (mostly) and referencing and dereferencing with \ and -> would become mostly unnecessary.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

update

I forgot to mention, every fancy feature comes with a price. In languages like JS or Python name-collisions are a quite common trap.

For instance if you assign to a variable list when the function/method list already exists.

And equally named nouns and verbs are quite common in English due to it's simplicity of grammar.° (e.g. compare noun Liste vs verb listen in German)

This is never a problem in Perl! $list will never collide with &list ....

°) a funnier example Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

In reply to Re: Is glob feature really useful? by LanX
in thread Is typeglob feature really useful? by xiaoyafeng

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