So where is your threshold? How many ways to say the same thing are OK, and at how many it's one too much?

I think the current syntax defaults for stuff like if, while etc is OK. But going a bit higher onto things like multi methods, signatures, overloading, grammars have to have some standard or default way of doing. Else the syntax combinations will run into permutations and combinations. And there will far too much complexity to deal with. And since most of them offer same semantic capabilities, the competition will be more on which one has more syntactic sugar.

For a moment keep 'OO' aside, Imagine what would happen if in a single program three different 'if' synonyms, 'switch' synonyms etc Start appearing in a huge code base and one is asked to maintain such code in the DarkPAN. Perl starts to suffer from same decade old 'unmaintainable' infamy.

I'm not telling people must stop experimenting this kind of stuff, in fact we must continue. Neither am I suggesting we must halt at one way of declaring something, that would obviously be wrong. Since once a particular way is chosen and taken and then fears of breaking backward compatibility stops us from correcting past mistakes and those mistakes carry on over time.

We must surely keep new things coming on CPAN. As you suggested pushing things into the core is not a good idea. But the alternate to that is "new syntax through CPAN".However a proper guide/policy is needed as to indicate what is saner/safer to use. Before a lot of code comes out.

In reply to Re^6: What is best for the future. by Anonymous Monk
in thread What is best for the future. by Anonymous Monk

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