I've had an idea rattling around in my head for awhile now, and thought I'd run it up the flag pole to see who salutes. The gist of it is this, in the spirit of anything the core can do the user can to, syntax for many functions should be tweaked. Instead of push @foo, 'bar' the syntax would be push \@foo, 'bar'; Afterall, this is what user defined code must do. One could go the other way and allow user-defined code to act as push etc. do now. However, I suggest that where an array or hash is to be modified a reference should be passed. In this manner, any unescaped hash or array in code could be read as an in place expansion of that variable; removing ambiguity and making the code easier to understand for beginners. This also has the advantage of rendering syntax such as push @{ $arrayref }, 'scalar'; unnecessary. This is purely hypothetical as I realize this is a rather major change and unlikely to happen. What do you think?

PS> On a seperate but related note, things like keys might then be reasonably expected to except a hash or hash reference; which IMHO would be most useful.

--
perl -wpe "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

In reply to Consistency, syntax, and little minds by belg4mit

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