Syntactic Difficulties

• Perl programmers are even more obsessed with syntax than other programmers

• For example, suppose $object is a closure-based object

• You can call the function like this:

        $object->(...)

• So the way you send this object a message is:

        $object->('message', arguments...)

• Perl community response: ICK

• Apparently, God ordained that the syntax look like this:

        $object->message(arguments...)

• Perl community response: YUM

• So OK, you insert some syntactic sugar

• A surprising amount of my book concerns syntactic sugar

• I had to abandon several examples

  • I just couldn't find any way to make them readable

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Copyright 2005 M. J. Dominus