I think it was the colon, yeah. I could be wrong -- my memory on this is a bit hazy -- but I seem to remember the trinary operator is what prevented the single colon from being used before. Doubling the colon requires doubling the question mark to look reasonably balanced.
And funnily enough, I didn't realize you had doubled all your punctuation until after I had read your reply a second or third time. I almost spit soda all over my keyboard because of that. :-)
Update: from Exegesis 3:
The ?? and :: are the new way we write the old ?: ternary operator in Perl 6. Larry had to change the spelling because he needed the single colon for marking adverbs. But it's a change for the better anyway --it was rather odd that all the other short-circuiting logical operators (&& and || and //) used doubled symbols, but the conditional operator didn't. Well, now it does. The doubling also helps it stand out better in code, in part because it forces you to put space around the :: so that it's not confused with a package name separator.
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The doubling also helps it stand out better in code, in part because it forces you to put space around the :: so that it's not confused with a package name separator.
Aha! Another sneaky instance of required whitespace! (What will this do to golf scores?)
-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of
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Ok, thanks for reminding me. I knew the answer would be in some Exegesis somewhere...
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