Named arguments, default values, parameter checking are all syntactic sugar, which sure, is somewhat nice to have, but is no possible way essential. Every time you go "I can do this using this little longer syntax" - you already disqualified it as a "long overdue must have feature".

Really, anything beyond binary can be considered syntactic sugar. It's up to you to decide how much you want, but I don't believe refusing a feature because it is "syntactic sugar" is reasonable; there are other, better criteria for this.

This is something I had to write 2 months ago. I can not write this in perl, and am not likely to ever be able to.

Ah, but this doesn't necessarily mean it can't be written in perl. You might just need to use a little longer syntax. ;)

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.