Top 10 perl books

[Paul Makepeace]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 4:51 AM, Greg McCarroll <greg at mccarroll.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 06:39:28PM +0100, Frank v Waveren wrote:
>  >
>  > syntactic sugar
>  >
>
>  Maybe I'm just getting old, but the more I think about syntactic sugar
>  the more I appreciate it.
>
> Lastly
>
>     sub foo {
>         my $self = shift;
>         my ($whatever,...) = @_;
>
>  is instantly recognisable as a method.

If you like syntactic sugar, how about,

  def foo(self, whatever, ...):

;-)

>
>  My feeling is that syntactic sugar helps the equivalent of muscle
>  memory for the brain, you just dont have to actually consciously think
>  as much to figure out whats going on.
>
>  If I was language designer I think this would be the axe I'd want to
>  grind - a simple basic language with an evolving set of macros on top
>  to allow people to figure out how best to explain what low level
>  patterns are going on.
>
>  G.
>
>
>  [1] There is a bit of me that would further like to see this
>     constrained to the output having the same number of
>     elemements & structure and an additional bit of syntactic sugar
>     added for when this is not the case.
>