Re: Re: Why not support this syntax?

[scott]

Well, I know why I'd like to see it.

One of the reasons I like Perl is its 'humanness', e.g. when I speak to humans (well, some of them anyway) I can say 'it' or 'those' and they usually know what I mean and in Perl, of course, we've got $_ and @_.

In short, I like my programming language to be as much like my speaking language as possible. Us humans have no trouble understanding what 1 < x < y <= z < 12 means without writing it as a conjunction of independent order tests: ( 1 < x ) && ( x < y ) ...

Therefore, I wish Perl was such that perl could understand the human form as well.

Alternately, yes you could write a subroutine but ... then you'd have to write a subroutine!

I prefer to have the tools I use do as much of my work for me as possible -- well, all of it actually but that hasn't ever happened yet and I'm not optimistic. :)

Penultimately, I say it's definitely not complicated enough. When I can talk to it in English and have it do what I want, then it'll be complicated enough. In a less tongue-in-cheek mode, the complexity of the parser shouldn't, IMHO, drive the development of the language. The first sentence of the Preface of the Camel book is 'Perl is a language for getting your job done'. It's not 'Perl is a language with a reasonably, but not unreasonably, complicated parser'.

Ultimately, since I don't have to write the parser ... :)

Scott