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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!psuvax1!flee
- From: flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee)
- Subject: Re: kosher?
- Message-ID: <Bs65nz.E90@cs.psu.edu>
- Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: dictionopolis.cs.psu.edu
- References: <ROBT.92Jul29134230@idt101.is.morgan.com>
- <1992Jul29.193125.19094@news.eng.convex.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 22:14:20 GMT
- Lines: 24
-
- In comparison, REXX also has a form of "unquoted" strings, such that
- say hello world
- is equivalent to
- say "HELLO" "WORLD"
-
- This isn't really an unquoted string; it's more like an alternative to
- 'undef'. In REXX, any symbol not assigned a value has its name as a
- default value. I seem to remember an IBM mainframe implementation of
- Lisp that had similar behavior.
-
- This doesn't work well for Perl, because Perl doesn't quite have
- symbols. Perl is rather committed to funny punctuation like '$foo'.
- Inadvertently using 'foo' instead of '$foo' is a subtle typo that's a
- little hard to find.
-
- Tom Christiansen:
- > The problem is that Larry might make blah or bleh reserved words.
-
- In principle, this doesn't have to be a problem. There aren't that
- many words with syntactic significance, and most of them are only
- meaningful in limited contexts. You can also allow user definitions
- to override keywords without much problem. (But trying to make the
- keyword use available in the same scope gets a little nasty.)
- --
-