> Most of the time a function isn't going to take two lists.
I think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can't count the number
of times I had to code around 'args are one big happy list' with
typeglobs or some other hacks. If it's easy, I think it's a very
natural (and efficient) way to do things. It's much faster to push
two refs on the stack than X+Y elements.
> I think people will latch rather quickly onto the Perl5ism that
> backslash means to protect the following thing from interpretation.
> It's so much like how backslash behaves in the usual Unix string,
> and it's so much like how ampersand behaves in C.
I thought my point was that 'most of the time people won't be using
references' wasn't necessarily true. Here you say they'll catch on
rather quickly. Does that mean you agree?
> On the other hand, the folks looking at persistence say that the
> current default string conversion of references is rather useful,
Most of the time people aren't going to be using object persistence.
(I couldn't resist.) Seriously, this is obviously a special case that
won't directly affect most people; the persistence people can do a
little extra work to get that behavior so most of us don't have to
suffer for it. I think that most of the time (perhaps not when I'm
debugging) 'SCALAR=(0x74000)' as an object's string representation is
not going to do me any good.
Well, it might build character.
-- Robert