Hello Oiskuu,

Thanks for meditating! =)

I like the idea of sigil less variables, but I doubt this is feasible in Perl, cause there are too many cases where context matters, so you can't avoid @ and % to denote it...

... like in %settings = (%defaults, %arguments)

Perl without sigils would be a kind of JavaScript (which isn't bad, just very reduced)

I always thought of sigils as a way to spare me of Hungarian notation, in order to understand which type a variable has.

Also sigils help avoiding namespace collisions with builtins, like in $length .

> As it stands, mixing arrays and lists come with many nasty pitfalls.

That's why I was meditating about a very simple change, to implicitly replace any my @arr; with my @arr;my $arr = \@arr; .

This could be implemented easily (e.g. macro mechanism) and the effects are obvious.

Though I was naive with the vice versa part, because my $var could be any datatype, so aliasing my @var to @$var wouldn't be obvious.

And one of the most important use cases is passing data structures around, so my $arr = shift would cause a dangerous ambiguity when forcing an automatic alias.

Though an extended syntax like sub foo { my $arr[] = shift; ... } (or my \@arr = shift ) might solve this and implicitly alias @arr (or $arr respectively).

UPDATE

I'm just realizing that something like my $arr[] = shift has an extra benefit of allowing runtime errors if the wrong type is passed to $arr, while writing my $arr = shift would allow to pass whatever you want. :)

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!

PS: As a side note:

I was once meditating of adding new sigils for €arrrefs and £hashrefs but this is not only problematic with character encodings but also with keyboard designs.

Just think of The Damians suggestion of appending _ref to each $name. What I do is to prepend $a_... , $h_... , $c_...' . This could be avoided if we had sigils for those references.

In reply to Re^2: Unifying namespaces of @name and $name... (bare lexicals) by LanX
in thread Unifying namespaces of @name and $name to simplify dereferencing? by LanX

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