Re: Thoughts on replacing -> with .

[radiantmatrix]

This is a big change, I hope the Porters don't rush to any decision. My thoughts in brief, as a Perl developer for nigh-on 20 years:

1. Being "more like other languages" is not a good reason for a major operator change
2. -> is, fundamentally, a dereference operator; it's used for objects because Perl objects are blessed references. Changing the operator for objects but not other references needlessly hides this
3. ~ as a concatenation operator is, IMO, a recipe for developer confusion
4. In most code I've worked with, concats are vastly more common than method calls. Why make the less-common operator easier to type and the more-common one harder to type? I acknowledge this may only reflect my opinion and the way I use Perl
5. I happen to like the visual separation that -> provides. Its sheer width helps make method calls stand out; likewise, I like . as a concat, since its narrowness helps see that the elements "run together"

I have always wondered why no one seems to have proposed the use of some variant of the :: notation as an optional alternative to ->...