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Postings from May 2001
I'd just like to point out that it's already becoming fairly easy
to establish a bare alias for a scalar variable even in Perl 5:
my $foo;
my sub foo : lvalue { $foo }
This sort of thing will only get easier in Perl 6, when people can pull
in their own grammatical rules to enable them to say
my foo;
to mean the above, or something like it. So people who hate funny
characters can define as many bare names as they like. They'll just
have to figure out how to interpolate them, and they'll have to use
explicit method calls to establish some of the context that Perl can
currently guess from the funny characters. And they'll likely be
reviled by the people who prefer the culture of $ and @. There may be
wars fought, and the standard Perl libraries may be subject to ethnic
cleansing. Culture wars arise spontaneously, but that should not deter
us from enabling people to build new cultures. Perhaps some of those
new cultures will be slightly less hostile to other cultures, knowing
their multicultural roots. If Perl culture has no other effect on the
world, I hope it shows how a culture can be aware of both its own
strengths and its own limitations.
I happen to like $ and @. They're not going away in standard Perl as
long as I have anything to do with it. Nevertheless, my vision for Perl
is that it enable people to do what *they* want, not what I want.
Larry
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