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Re: Experimental features: autoderef vs postfix derefby sundialsvc4 (Abbot) |
on Jul 13, 2015 at 17:22 UTC ( [id://1134551]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
I will frankly agree with you, BrowserUK. (Upvoted.) The big problem that I have with most of these “fee-churs” is that they add a new “M” to “DWIM,” apparently just to save a few keystrokes. Most of the time, a programming language doesn’t really need another way to say the same thing. All that this really does, is to introduce yet-another element of functional ambiguity into the syntax ... which is especially a problem when the “correct” interpretation depends on (even for the moment ...) some obscure use clause. Given that programmers have to maintain source-code libraries consisting of maybe hundreds of thousands of lines, it really isn’t a good thing for there to be more-than-one way to say one-thing. There probably will be no at-runtime difference, as the compiler might well translate both constructs into the same underlying perlguts. But, there is a pragmatic difference, caused both by the ambiguity and by the co-existence of “old” and “new,” within the same voluminous code-base. Only a very few, like “immediate-OR,” are both clean-enough and isolated-enough to be (IMHO) a genuine, relatively risk-averse, win. Language features, however well-intentioned they may be, must be judged in a very long view. We do every day deal with vast code-bases that were constructed over the period of many years, even as the [Perl...] language itself evolved, as it were, “beneath their feet.” That source-code is worth many millions of currency-units. [Perl], itself, is not.
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