🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <HSU.95Apr17080522@shadows.cs.hut.fi>,
Heikki Suonsivu <hsu@cs.hut.fi> wrote:
: 
: In article <niels.798025941@darwin> niels@darwin.life.uiuc.edu (Niels Larsen) writes:
:    How about posting *widely* the question "what will gawk be able to do
:    that Perl cannot do now?". That will be interesting for gawk people
:    certainly, but maybe there are a couple of ideas that would improve 
:    Perl further.
: 
: How about changing perl syntax to be more like awk or C?  I $$mean @less
: $-signs = <and> &other *special \%characters?

Then it would be less like the shell.  :-)

You'll be pleased to know that I've been trying real hard to get rid of
unnecessary punctuation in Perl 5.  You'll be displeased to know that I
don't think noun markers like $ and @ unnecessary.  Not only do they
function like case markers do in human language, but they are
automatically distinguished within interpolative contexts, and the user
doesn't have to worry about different syntactic treatments for variable
references within or without such a context.

But the & prefix on verbs is now optional, just as "do" is in English.
I do hope you do understand what I mean.

For example, you used to have to write this:

    &california || &bust;

It can now be written more cleanly like this:

    california or bust;

Strictly speaking, of course, $ and @ aren't case markers, but number
markers.  English has mandatory number markers, and people get upset
when they doesn't agree.

It were just convenient in Perl (for the shellish interplative reasons
mentioned above) to pull the markers out to the front of each noun
phrase.  Most people seems to like it that way.  It certainly seem to
make more sense than putting them on the end, like most varieties of
BASIC does.

Larry