Re^6: Why Perl 6 is taking so !@#$ long

[grinder]

"It's not source filtering is it?"

Smart match, switch, say and the like were added to the language in December 2005 by Robin Houston. See the summary for a starting place to find out more. You might also have to go back a few weeks to catch all the developments. In short, no, it's not a filter.

[shotgunefx]

Now that I'm happy to hear :)

One question thought, anyone know why they went with "err"? Just seems like it would clash with a lot of things and off the top of my head, doesn't seem very intuitive.

[benizi]

A quote from the "Time to release 5.9.3?" section of the summary pointed out by your parent poster:

To summarise: just about everyone thinks that err sucks, but no-one can think of anything better.

Personally, I like Yves's 'dor' (defined-or) suggestion.

[shotgunefx]

Saw that note, (was pm'ed to me after my post). Funny, "dor" was the first thing that popped into my head too. (see above)

[chromatic]

What does intuition have to do with computers?

[shotgunefx]

Not sure if there is a little sarcasm in that message or not, but I'll assume there isn't.

I would say it has nothing to do with computers, and much to do with programming languages, or at least Perl. Obviously, a large part of Perl's attraction is DWIM, which to me implies intuition, at least to a point.

Not knowing that "err" is "defined OR", my first thought would be that it had something to do with exceptions. The definition of the word implies that it has something to do with errors.

While expressions in programming languages and human languages often don't match up, they more often do. "do, if, else, and, or, etc, not, while, use, etc".

Seems like it should have been more appropriately named defor, dor, whatever.

[demerphq]

IMO a fair amount. You wouldn't want to name a routine that sums a list 'avg' would you? Naming something that has nothing to do with errors 'err' is IMO a bad plan. And clashes with expectations generated by other languages. (Such as VB which uses the err object for exception throwing.)

I said all this on p5p at the time, but to no avail.