This minor inconvenience
It may look minor to you. But think how often you index in a hash in a typical program, and how often you call a method/subroutine on the LHS of an operator. All those minor
inconveniences add up to one big inconvenience.
for the benefits we gain. Many of those benefits, in fact, are involved with giving Perl a powerful, robust OO model.
*blink* Then I must have understood the benefits of significant whitespace totally wrong. The hash index without whitespace gives us the ability to leave off parenthesis around an
if clause. The sub/method
whitespace rule gives us the ability to sometimes leave off
parenthesis in an expression. It's completely unclear to me how the whitespace rules are being used to build an OO model.
I might be willing to accept the significant whitespace rules if there was a significant gain. So far, every gain I've seen explained involves the ability to leave of parenthesis.
Abigail