I find it amazing that you find five characters (the space is optional) for lambdas too long -- heck, the proper name of the feature is longer then that.

I've given this a bit of thought: it's not so much the sub {...} part that I find verbose as the fact that I can't bind variables in a convenient way: I either have to use up keystrokes with a my ($x,$y,$z) = @_; at the front of the lambda, or constantly index @_ (which looks awful).

For instance, in Haskell the "zip" function (take a pair of lists and return a list of pairs) is defined as: 

zip = zipWith (\x y -> (x,y))

[download]
(What's important here is the lambda.) In Perl, assuming an equivalent zipWith, you'd have to say: 
zipWith {[$_[0], $_[1]]} @foo, @bar;
# or:
zipWith {($a,$b)=@_;[$a,$b]} @foo, @bar;
# or:
zipWith {[unshift,unshift]} @foo, @bar;

[download]
none of which looks as pretty. That's more a matter of opinion, of course.

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
% man 3 strfry

In reply to Re^2: Indispensible language features by FoxtrotUniform
in thread Indispensible language features by FoxtrotUniform

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