I find the arrow perfectly consistent with its use in C and C++. You use an arrow when you access things through a reference. A dot when you access things directly. But in Perl you never really have an object, you have a reference to it and access it through that reference, which matches the notation.

For instance if you make a copy of an object, and adjust that copy, the original changes. If you make a copy of an object and rebless it, the original is now in a different class. Those internal details show that any and all accesses to the object are taking place through a level of dereferencing. If the data was immediate then modifying a copy wouldn't change the other copies. But it isn't immediate and so changes are shared among all references to that object.

That said, Perl 6 is doing a lot to reduce how much the programmer needs to think about explicitly dereferencing data structures. Therefore it makes sense to me to have the arrow change to a dot to indicate the fact that we are supposed to stop thinking so much about dereferencing...

In reply to Re (tilly) 12: Perl6 headaches? by tilly
in thread Perl6 headaches? by mattg

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.