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in reply to What would you change?

I never liked the print syntax. That whole optional-parameter-but-with-no-comma thing really gets my goat. I'd rather just always use select instead of sticking the filehandle in the print statement, but I don't. It eats me up inside, I tell you.

I can never remember what the syntax is for taking a slice on a hashref. I have to fiddle with it every time, no matter how many times it comes up. Rather than dealing with an appalling mess of curlies and sigils, I would really liked to have had a slice operator that could be used like my @stuff = slice $href, qw/key1 key2 key3/; Yeah, I could probably write it myself, but I'm lazy.

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Re^2: What would you change?
by ikegami (Patriarch) on May 17, 2008 at 03:55 UTC

    I never liked the print syntax. That whole optional-parameter-but-with-no-comma thing really gets my goat

    There been an alternative for quite some time. 

    use IO::Handle qw( );
STDOUT->print("Hello World!\n");

    [download]

    Works on any handle.

    I would really liked to have had a slice operator

    How does adding slice break perl's backwards compatibility?

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Re^2: What would you change?
by Porculus (Hermit) on May 17, 2008 at 21:20 UTC
    Rather than dealing with an appalling mess of curlies and sigils...

    I can't recall ever wanting to take a slice of a hashref myself, but this line aroused my curiosity, so I investigated to see just how bad it could be.

    First I went for the naive approach:

    my @stuff = @$href{ qw/key1 key2 key3/ };

    And was rather surprised to discover that I'd got it right first try!

    Perhaps the reason this seems intuitive to me and not to you because I already habitually write $$href{key1} rather than $href->{key1}, so I'm used to using double sigils to dereference things? (Henceforth I shall use this consistency as an argument in favour of my preferred syntax!)

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      For extra clarity (to me, anyway), I prefer to write it as:

      my @stuff = @{$hashref}{ qw(key1 key2 key3) };
# or
my @keys = qw(key1 key2 key3);
my @stuff2 = @{$hashref}{ @keys };

      [download]

      (with the extra curlies). For some reason I never was crazy about the arrow shortcut here. In fact... umm... how do I correctly write the above using the arrow? I can't get it to work.

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