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Re: pragmas



Piers Cawley <pdcawley@bofh.org.uk> writes:

> Bob Cassels <bobcassels@netscape.net> writes:
>
>> mvanier@cs.caltech.edu wrote:
>>
>>>Good to know ;-)
>>>
>>>I think much of the prejudice against perl has to do with people (like me)
>>>who only used it way back when there weren't a lot of the current options.
>>>
>>>Perl seems to win the prize as the language with the most pragmas, by which
>>>I mean language-altering special statements (maybe there is a better word
>>>for this).  You got yer "use strict", "use warnings", etc. etc.
>>>How do people feel about this feature in general?
>>>
>>
>> To me, semantics-altering pragmas feel like a good way to make code
>> harder to read.  (And I prefer readability.)  People complain about
>> macros making code harder to read.  At least with macros, you can see
>> that there's something you have to look for and understand, so you
>> know you have to work a little harder to understand new code.  But
>> with pragmas, you need to know they're present, and figure out whether
>> they matter for any piece of code you're looking at.  Or else you risk
>> misunderstanding the code.
>
> Which is why such pragmata are lexically scoped (now) in Perl. Anyone
> who wishes to point at some delightful global variables as $[ (Don't
> like arrays starting at zero? Just do '$[ = 11' and look, they start
> at 11 now. Once upon a time changing this changed the array base
> *everywhere*, but it's not been like that for long time, and the only
> reason anything remotely like it is still there is because there are
> still fossil scripts out there that were built on top of a2p generated
> scripts.) which is a fossil and the sooner it goes away the happier
> we'll all be...

Hmm... that sentence got away from me didn't it?

-- 
Piers