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in reply to Re: Re: Apocalypse 12
in thread Apocalypse 12

My overall first impression is that Perl 6 will be much better than for Perl 5 for building really large systems, so I'd like to see some examples in E12 illustrating how Perl 6 scales better.

So far, I like it a lot. The only thing that has caused me to pull a face is the whitespace-changing semantics in the Methods section where Larry commented:

Yes, this is different from Perl 5. And yes, I know certain people hate it. They can write their own grammar.

This scares me enough to always put parens around function calls (which I mostly do in Perl 5 anyway). So, if you can unscare me, that would be nice. :-)

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Re: Apocalypse 12
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Apr 19, 2004 at 08:09 UTC
    This scares me enough to always put parens around function calls
    You know what's really scary? Depending on how you place your parens, that might not save you. Say you want to call a method (does the new rule count for subroutine calls as well?) which takes an argument, and add 1 to the result. Just like in Perl5, you use parens: 
        obj.method ($arg) + 1;

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    In that case, you might as well have not put the parens there - it's equivalent to: 
        obj.method ($arg + 1);

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    If you want to be save, and not depend on unnatural (unnatural in the sense that all major programming languages I know don't have their expressions change meaning depending whether there's a space before an opening paren or not) whitespace rules you have to use an extra set of parens: 
       (obj.method ($arg)) + 1;

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    Abigail

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      There is no point in designing your own language if you aren't going to do a few things different from everyone else. You can carp all you like, but this is one thing I choose to do differently.
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