Re: Syntactic conventions

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great steve donovan once stated:
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:13 AM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> > I think what we *can* get is a view of a particular 1990 aesthetic. Like
> > many languages of the period, Perl was deeply scarred by the simultaneous
> > need for automatic storage management but fear/envy of garbage collection.
> > malloc is macho. Reference counting is efficient. Creating references is a
> > special act.
> 
> Maybe so, but the need for $ for each variable escapes me.  

  One reason to do it is that you can add keywords to the language without
breaking existing code.  

> So $ in Lua identifiers would bother me - use would immediately split
> into the front-$ and the back-$ camps anyway. It all feels like
> bikeshedding because it's very hard to think of adding something to
> Lua that would have a multiplier effect on its expressiveness or use.

  -spc (But using a back$ could be used to mark strings! 8-P