First, I think I saw somewhere something like, "%perl6hash{$key}{$key}" and the lack of context prefixing made me feel very sad. I resist change, and I really like the way perl uses $ in scalar contexts and @ in array ones. If "%perl6hash{$key}{$key}" is a scalar, why the % prefix? Kinda reminds me of the changes to nwn2 — too much response to critics and not enough actual innovation. But I know almost nothing about it, so I'm probably totally wrong.

I did share the same exact feeling because the old current behaviour does make sense. But the more I think about it, the more I realize the new one does as well, and probably more too: in fact the former has some corner cases in which it doesn't square well. I can remember in particular a discussion with Uri Guttman in clpmisc... if $href contains a hashref, then what is $href->{'item1','item2'} to mean? To be unambiguous you have to use the other kind of dereferencing:

my $multi=${$href}{'item1','item2'};  # "multi"...
my @slice=@{$href}{'item1','item2'};

[download]

But to resolve the ambiguity with the first attempt the core developers made a choice that IMVHO is in retrospective not the most intuitive one. However in Perl 6 all possible ambiguities will be resolved with a consistent design and as a plus explicit referencing and dereferencing will be required on a much more sparse basis than currently is.

Said, this, I'm sure quite about everyone has some "favourite" piece of Perl 6 syntax or semantics that he doesn't particularly like. I, for one, I'm in the camp of those who dislike the choice of unicode operators at all. I suppose I could easily be called "old-minded". I guess I am. But given that they will have ASCII only equivalents and that both will be more or less equally easy to type and read, I don't care much after all.

In reply to Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6? by blazar
in thread What's wrong with Perl 6? by duff

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