Why settle for three states when you can have a range of confidence? Read up on fuzzy sets.

There are already some calls in Perl (and other languages like C) that return yes/no/error values. This means that if you're handling errors correctly you're already handling three-state logic.

The language itself need not support three-state variables in order for you to write a program with three-state logic. It certainly could help. In the meantime, though, there are positive/negative/zero and less/equal/more available. Integers or even floating point numbers (0 to 1 instead of 0 to infinity) are very useful as truth values or condition markers in some situations.

What you're likely missing isn't a way to represent more than two states in a variable, since lots of data structures and even simple scalars can give you that. What's really handy is an N-way control flow which given/when can provide.


In reply to Re: Will Perl6 be able to do this kind of logic? by mr_mischief
in thread Will Perl6 be able to do this kind of logic? by zentara

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.