larry wall's take on languages

[tom]

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html">http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html

[newdep]

Even after 14 years Larry is still zifting and comparing other languages.

He calls his own language "Post-Modern". Larry, who studied

linguistics, was the one who came up with Perl!??

..Larry..Good luck with Perl 6 7 8 9 10.. I wont miss it ;-)

[cormullion]

a good read - a lot of it over my head though (what's a twigil?)

Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals.



And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.

Perhaps there should be a scripting version of LISP...? :)

We're getting rid of some of our punctuation

;)

[DrDave]

from wikipedia



A sigil... ( pl. sigilia or sigils) is a symbol created for a specific magical purpose.



In programming, it is a "magical symbol" (LOL) post-fixed to a word to give it "special" meaning. For example,  'text$'.  '$' informs one that the variable 'text$' holds text.



He explained in the doc that a twigil is a second sigil, so that the word now has a SECOND bit of "magical" meaning (LOL).  'text$%' has the sigil '$' and twigil '%'



But really, there is no need for creating the word "twigil", because in the broad usage of sigil, a specific symbol can comprise several other symbols that combine to form the sigil. Therefore, in the above  examples, '$', '%', 'and '$%' can all three be considered as sigils in their own right. However,  allowing the sigil to be represented by more than a single post-fixed character opens the door to confusion.  So some careful thought will have to go into defining exactly what constitutes a "legal" sigil and the terminology used to refer to each symbol in the event of "multiple" sigils.



DrDave

[hsmyers]

twigil does not appear in the http doc. What are you talking about?

[DrDave]

twigil does not appear in the http doc. What are you talking about?

Hmmm, then from whence came this text on page 2 (link follows quotation):

Oddly, there's one spot where we're introducing new punctuation. After your sigil you can add a twigil, or secondary sigil. Just as a sigil tells you the basic structure of an object, a twigil tells you that a particular variable has a weird scope. This is basically an idea stolen from Ruby, which uses sigils to indicate weird scoping. But by hiding our twigils after our sigils, we get the best of both worlds, plus an extensible twigil system for weird scopes we haven't thought of yet.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html?page=2">http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/so ... tml?page=2">http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2007/12/06/soto-11.html?page=2



And it seems cormullion saw it as well:

a good read - a lot of it over my head though (what's a twigil?)

DrDave

[hsmyers]

Interesting, I just did a search on the text (from FIrefox) and I couldn't find the word!



Update: Couldn't find it because I didn't spell it correctly!! Typical...



--hsm