You're making the definition of the function more complex. It no longer does one single thing; it now does different things when called in different contexts.

If you hate the idea of people writing reduce expressions, and are afraid this would encourage it, I'm afraid that cow is already out of the barn. It's a fundamental function for array processing; a built-in one in many languages.

That cow is called "LISP", and it's been the toy of academics, and a total commerical failure, for approximately the last fourty years. The fundamentals of functional programming haven't changed since then. It's still too abstract, too pointless, and too far removed from the actual imperatives of daily life (there's a reason we think in an imperative style -- it's how we live).

Don't get me started on map() -- I've seen more twisted code written using map() idioms than any other. In general, when I see a map() statement, I have to mentally start refactoring, because odds are, the code won't work.

90% of the time, I'm right. People who use map() tend to be too clever for their own code, and write 80% solutions that have to be re-written from scratch to actually solve the real problem at hand. Maybe you're smart enough to pull off a functional language, but I've been bitten by too many people who weren't to be impressed.

So, if you want to program in a functional language, do so. But don't ruin perl any more than it is already -- God knows how many messes I've had to clean up thanks to overzelous use of map() statements! :-( I shudder to think what life will be like if reduce() (by any name) becomes part of the perl core! :-(
--
Ytrew

In reply to Re^3: RFC: Should join subsume reduce? by Anonymous Monk
in thread RFC: Should join subsume reduce? by Roy Johnson

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