in reply to OO in Perl 6

The second reason is that this change will likely facilitate introducing people to using Perl.

I don't buy this. If this was really a reason, they wouldn't have introduced gazillion things that no other language has in that form. Perl6 will be much further from anything a novice Perl programmer has encountered in other languages than Perl5; the dot vs arrow is insignificant. OTOH, it's one more thing that Perl5 programmers will learn if they switch to Perl6. Now, perhaps the Perl6 gang is more interested in drawing non-Perl programmers to Perl6 than it is in drawing Perl5 programmers to Perl6, but I think the biggest pool of Perl6 programmers will have to be drawn from the current Perl5 crowd.

Besides, the entire world doesn't use ".". Java does, and perhaps Perl wants to look more like its bigger and more important brother, but there are still some languages out there that use ->. Pike for instance.

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Re^2: OO in Perl 6
by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Oct 17, 2006 at 15:14 UTC
    It's not just Java that uses the dot. Ruby, JavaScript, C++, Eiffel, Python, Object Pascal, Oberon, and C are a few languages that use the dot for dereferencing one thing or another.

    PHP also uses -> for methods and such, but I don't remember the last time I wanted Perl to have syntax decsions based on PHP.

    As for frequency analysis (Huffman Coding), as often as people dereference stuff in modern Perl, it's smart to use an unshifted single key for it. I don't enjoy typing -> all the time, and if it becomes less common I'll appreciate that. Sure, concatenation goes from one unshifted character to one shifted character, but how many times do you concatenate a string vs. passing it around?


    Christopher E. Stith
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Re^2: OO in Perl 6
by Asim (Hermit) on Oct 17, 2006 at 14:03 UTC
    Perl6 will be much further from anything a novice Perl programmer has encountered in other languages than Perl5

    True. Yet the majority of those features are optional; what little muckin' about I've done with Perl6 has started from my Perl5 experience, and you can craft what's basically pared-down Perl5 code in Perl6. I think you overstate the effects of many (not all) of the new additions, in terms of programmer impact.

    Besides, the entire world doesn't use ".". Java does

    The simple point is that the majority of OO code written uses the period.

    ----Asim, known to some as Woodrow.

[reply]

      Especially the quintessential example of object orientation, Smalltalk... er....

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