Re: Modules to reduce syntax?

[LanX]

> $ref->{'foo'}{$bar}

and

> ref[foo].bar

are definitely not the same in JavaScript

[LanX]

It's not clear to me what you want, since your code is wrong.

Here the correct analogous:

$ref->{foo}{$bar}

(NB: autoquoting of key "foo" !)

is

demo in the JS console

>> ref={foo: {x:42}}
Object { foo: {…} }

>> bar="x"
"x"
>> ref.foo[bar]
42
>> ref['foo'][bar]
42

as a side note, $ is a legal identifier in JS so you can also write

>> $ref={foo: {x:42}}
Object { foo: {…} }

>> $ref['foo'][$bar]
42

update

demo in the Perl debugger

  DB<3> $ref = {foo=> { x => 42 } }

  DB<4> $bar = "x"

  DB<5> p $ref->{foo}{$bar}
42
  DB<6> p $$ref{foo}{$bar}
42

update

  DB<11> use experimental 'refaliasing'; \%ref = $ref

  DB<12> p $ref{foo}{$bar}
42

[LanX]

You can't get rid of the sigils $%@ in Perl, because of conflicts with barewords which have many other meanings and the many bultin commands which depend on sigils.

But this last example of aliasing a list-form and hashref-form \%hsh = $hsh could be simplified, such that the deref -> isn't needed anymore.

use Keyword::Simple to define a new command like e.g. var or let and any

var %hsh = LIST;

is translated to

my $hsh = \ my %hsh; %hsh = LIST;

This is not too hard to implement, because you don't need to parse LIST in advance (which could be arbitrary Perl code)

Like this explicit dereferencing with -> would be "simplified" away.

Demo:

  DB<27> sub LIST { foo => { x => 42 } }

  DB<28> $bar ='x'

  DB<29> my $hsh = \ my %hsh; %hsh = LIST; \\

  cont:  say $hsh{foo}{$bar}
42

Of course that way you'd loose the ability to have $ident and %ident in different namespaces, but that's often considered bad style anyway.

And passing of hash-refs, like with function-parameters wouldn't be that easy without additional \ref-operation

sub func {
   var (\%hsh,\@arr) = @_;

}

because otherwise var couldn't tell if a $scalar is meant to be aliased to a %hash or an @array

sub func {
   var ($hsh,$arr) = @_;  # ???

}

tho you might be able simplify the syntax in many cases with

sub func {
   var \(%hsh,@arr) = @_;

}

HTH! :)