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You can have colonpairs in identifiers. What's the justification? #1753
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Why they must be pairs? Or why do the use colons at all?
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We already have two reasons in core:
Since colonpairs are allowed in identifiers for the above cases, it naturally extends to The Slang-writers can get all the QASTs for colonpairs in |
Why is this allowed at all. FWIW, there are many things I wish we had written justification for, but I was unsure if this should be included in the docs. Now I learned that there were plans for this, so perhaps more tickets to come :) Anyway, Zoffix++, this explanation is short and very clear, I like it. |
For many aspects of the design, we asked ourselves if there was any generalization that we could achieve without adding cognitive stress to the user. When you already need to be able to name operators uniquely, you can go one of a number of ways: you can force everyone to give things an extra name that fits into the alphanumerics and provide some out-of-band way of mapping them to actual operators, or you can do the Lisp thing and define anything space-delimited as a name, or you can take the custom (read: non-extensible) approach that languages like C++ do. Or, you can come up with a general mechanism to allow quoting or string mapping within special names. We already had the colon pair mechanism available, so it was a no-brainer to use that to extend any name that needs to be able to quote uniquefying but non-standard characters (or other other information with a unique stringification to such characters). The operator names and parsing names mentioned by Zoffix++ are just two special reserved cases of that much huger namespace of names that are extended by one or more pairs. We don't really know how such names will be used in the future, but I guarantee you someone will think of more use cases for names that most naturally identify something uniquely through the use of non-alphanumerics. |
To add to the list of established usages of this, module versioning is one, per S11. Open question: in module versioning the order of the adverbs does not matter. So should
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Should we make a synopsis of what's been said here to the documentation? |
From the docs:
Here is a nicer example of that:
… but why?
This is probably some material for faq-why (“Why things are the way they are in Perl 6”).
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