Apparently dashes in variable names in Perl 6 are terribly controversial, "extra work" for programmers. I can see how forcing your shift-fingers not to press down is a bit of extra work, but believe it or not, you get used to it.

They've been the standard in functional languages for decades, so there is a great deal of prior art. And surely Perl programmers are among the elite few that can actually change the regular expression their chosen tool uses to highlight and select identifiers, we've already added $@%&* to the front.

Yes, this could have been done with simple method calls, but the original Haskell docs created their own syntax, and in Perl 6 we're free to create our own syntax as well. If as a programmer you want to stick to the same set of operators that's been in use since what, 1989 or even earlier, if you count the inheritance from all the way back in FORTRAM, feel free.

And yes, there are modules on CPAN that handle date formatting, and date conversion. This is not CPAN code, as the distinct lack of '->' and the use of custom operators such as '=<' should make clear. With this posting I'm merely experimenting with how to transform data reversibly from one format into the other, and in the process of reading the original Haskell document I came up with what I thought was a neat way to describe the bonding.

If it wasn't abundantly clear earlier, this isn't even so much as a proof of concept. I have a test suite that fails because I haven't created the operators, and a lib/Optical/Bench.pm that is a hollow shell consisting of nothing but documentation. I know there's a lot of ill will toward Perl 6 out there in the community, and people use it as a scapegoat for Perl's decline over the last 10 years rather than pointing to the fact that PHP took over the Apache market because it was easier to install or any number of reasons.

I happen to like what I've played with of the language as it addresses many of the concerns I've had with Perl5 over the years, and am willing to embrace its flaws. Those of you that aren't willing to approach perl 6 with an open mind are more than welcome to your opinion, but please don't criticize language features that you're not willing to take the time to understand. Not that it'll stop you, mere words won't do that.

In reply to Re: Focussing Haskell into Perl 6 by DrForr
in thread Focussing Haskell into Perl 6 by DrForr

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