Hello kcott!
Interesting to hear about your experience teaching students. I am sure
the style
you introduced might indeed help improve the situation you described.
But once you have declared a variable with a prefix, it is no longer
optional to remove the prefix. This is why I don't like the idea of
a prefix that is part of the variable name. A prefix as a part of the
sigil would seem like a better idea. Then it could be made optional.
For example, consider a function called with three references. A
scalar reference, a hash reference, and a string reference;
sub func {
my ( $rs_str, $hr_desktop_info, $ha_files ) = @_;
$$rs_string = update_string_ref();
for ( keys %$hr_desktop_info ) {
...
push @$ha_files, $file;
}
....
}
I seems to me like the prefixes will introduce too much noise in the
source code. In this case, it might be better if only the first line in the function
documented the type of the reference, and then subsequent lines could
omit the variable name prefix:
sub func {
my ( $rs_str, $hr_desktop_info, $ha_files ) = @_;
$$str = update_string_ref();
for ( keys %$desktop_info ) {
...
push @$files, $file;
}
....
}
Of course, the above code is not yet possible. And further it could
not easily be made part
of Perl in the future. But maybe a new type of prefix could be used, for example
$>$,
$>%, and
$>@ ?
sub func {
my ( $>$str, $>%desktop_info, $>@files ) = @_;
....
}
On the other hand, I can see the clash here with the Perl special variable
$> (The
effective uid of this process). So this syntax might be difficult to
implement.
Regarding the last point of your reply. Yes, I agree that if I call func( $var->@* ), the
function will indeed receive @$var. But I assumed a function definition
on the form
sub func {
my ( $var ) = @_;
...
}
Now, the function would "receive"
$var->[0] ( in the sense that
$var in the function will be equal
$var->[0] of the caller). But I think this
(minor) issue of whether the function receives the whole array or only
its first item is just a distraction from the main topic of the
discussion. So I will not go further into the issue.
