Well, I wouldn't put ties and closures on the same level as evals, especially if you mean string-eval.

They're all potentially evil. Try working with code like this. What does it do?

$x = $h { foo($y) };
$z = &$x( $a );
eval $z if ( $b );

[download]

I don't even know; and I invented this example. :-)

Note that for large hashes and complex, 1000 line functions with obscure return values, you won't really know what that code actually does; it's very hard to figure out what's going on, until runtime (and sometimes not even then -- we've got a special abstraction layer that re-implements a turing machine in software. Don't ask! And the system's too slow! Gof figure!). Welcome to my world. :-(

Note also that if $h is a tied hash, it can change the values of $a and $b. Heck, it could even change the meaning of the code to be evaluated in $z.

Perl's nature is intrinsically that of a polymorphic, complex, dynamic language with a rich syntax and semantic.

It's been growing every more complex every year for the last ten years; and I felt had too much unnecessary complexity back in 1996. Expanding the language rather than cleaning it up and simplifying the messy parts hardly seems a winning propositon to me. It feels like we've been doing a nosedive in wrong direction... and I worried that Perl 6 is mostly cool new features, without concern for how they'll be (mis)used.

You have to live with that!

Maybe, but I don't have to like it. :-( And it takes a massive amount of lobbying effort to get management to change languages, so I'm probably stuck with Perl; a fringe language like Io will need greater support (and much better documentation) before I'll be allowed to code in it/learn it.
--
Ytrew

In reply to Re^3: RFC: feature proposal re code in @INC by Anonymous Monk
in thread RFC: feature proposal re code in @INC by blazar

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