Re^2: Stupid mistakes I repeatedly make

[TimToady]

Well, hey, at least they'll be different stupid mistakes. I was reassured by most of the articles on this thread that Perl 6 will prevent most of the mistakes that people make in Perl 5. The only red flag I saw was how semicolons sneak into lists sometimes, so I'm thinking about how to keep that from becoming tragic in Perl 6. Currently it would turn the list into a list of lists, which is not likely to return a useful diagnostic. Probably we'll fix it by only differentiating semicolon from comma if bound to an array of Lazy lists. Otherwise we can just make it behave like a strange looking comma, which will effectively be a no-op if you accidentally type it at the end of a list.

[rg0now]

I am not entirely sure I get your point. You mean that if you mistype the comma in

@array[10, 42]

(which would be just two elements of @array similar to Perl5) and accidentally change it to a semicolon

@array[10; 42]

then you get a multi-dimensional array? Do arrays automatically promote to multiple dimensions? If this is the case, then it is indeed a call for stupid mistakes, which are hard to uncover...

By the way: for me at least Perl 6 native multi-dimensional arrays do not seem to be essential. I mean they are pretty nice, but I could definitely live without them in Perl 6.0.0. At least, poor autrijus might have some less sleepless nights implementing hard-to-implement-only-marginally-useful language features...:-)