Ovid's reference to readability is wrong IMHO, the intent of "@array" is indeed clear.

That's unfortunate because it transformed a perfectly sensible suggestion about robustness - try to avoid global variables if you can, they might bite you in the long run - in a battle for idioms.

Some of your suggestions might be read in that light too, but I'd make them more explicit:

• Variable names inside quoted strings? - are you thinking about overloading the stringification operator?
• But what the hell is that dot doing there!? - are you thinking about overloading the dot operator?
• ... I fail to see a reason why nested function calls might be detrimental from a robustness point of view though.

Operator overloading is definitely possible but highly improbable though as it's quite difficult (at least for me) to overload an operator in every possible scope. I'm eager to see comments about it, I'll be able to learn something about operator overloading at last :).

Anyway... I tend to consider operators safe and the transformations unneeded. (I would stress I in the last statement).

Personally, I always feel a strange tingling when using "@expand_me", and I do so only in very basic situations and temporary print statements for debugging. I prefer Ovid's way in code that has a longer lifespan. This is where I set the line between idiomatic and idiotic (couldn't resist the pun, sorry).

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