comment on

> then it still used (f ...) syntax, but let the programmer specify rules to decide what to do based on any subset of the parameters.

multimethods?

> I have no problem with auto-deref.

one of the peculiar sides of Perl is that plenty of build-ins internally work on references and but force you to dereference the argument manually.

Furthermore since map and grep operate on lists and return lists it's not trivial to define other functional constructs which only operate on refs.

For instance a function keygrep {... } %hash isn't very clever, since %hash is listified, OTOH keygrep { } $href breaks the symmetry and can't be recombinded with map / grep (at least on the RHS).

Now a method could easily fill this niche by operating on _refs_ and returning _refs_ :

$href->keygrep(/.../)->map(\&func)->grep(/.../)

Maybe not easy to explain, but this caused me many headaches in the past...

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

In reply to Re^5: Autoboxing ... "Yes We Can" ( or how I learned to love TIMTOWTDI ) by LanX
in thread Autoboxing ... "Yes We Can" ( or how I learned to love TIMTOWTDI ;) by LanX

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