[FoRK] Open source PowerShell clone available

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:37:33PM +0200, Andy Armstrong said:
> /me wonders whether anyone who isn't actively following P6 development 
> /might/ have got a little lost (and fearful / contemptuous) somewhere 
> around halfway through that post :)

It did occur to me just after I hit send that I probably ought to have 
vetted it. I blame a complete lack of sleep. 

In summary - I don't think all sigils are bad. Personally I quite like 
them as type identifiers. I realise that might just be me and might just 
be because of familiarity but I suspect that Hungarian notation and 
friends indicate that they're useful to other people too.

The rub, therefore, is how much decoration. Take this Perl 6 (which 
means - get the iterator from the STDIN file handle and asign each 
iterator to the scalar variable named 'guess').


	for =$*IN -> $guess {
       ...
	}

I don't like it because I think it confuses ops with type decoration. 
It's too many sigils.

Otoh, lot's of people seem to like Ruby's optional question_mark for 
example. Perhaps all sigils should, like Hungarian notation, be 
completley optional 

	foo = bar[0]

is exactly the same as

	$foo = @bar[0]

Meh