Date: 2009jun24 Q. Got any Perl 6 suggestions? A. Perl 5 is great but some things just make no sense. 1. Parameters passing You can not do:

sub myfunc($a, $b, $c) { print $a, $b, $c; }

You must do:

sub myfunc($$$) { my($a, $b, $c) = @_; print $a, $b, $c; }

Its redundant! You have to say the types of the parameters twice. And its error prone. 2. All code must be in braces. You can not do:

if ($something) print "Hello\n";

Instead, you must do:

if ($something) { print "Hello\n"; }

No other common language make you do that. 3. Array element access. If you have:

my(@a);

You access elements like this:

print $a[5];

More sensible would be:

print @a[5];

4. Perl has a great variety of ways to quote but one that's missing is a heredoc that does not interpret variables. For example:

use strict; print <<EOF; see you @the movie EOF

Will give an error because their is no array called @the Maybe using a single quote (') could mean: don't interpret.

print <<'EOF; see you @the movie EOF

5. Official true and false. I am don't like using 1 and 0. 6. A === operator for comparing references. Like javaScript has. 7. A real switch statement like C has. But actually not requiring the break would be better. Want: Old code:

if ($a eq 'one') { print "ONE"; } elsif ($a eq 'two') { print "TWO"; } elsif ($a eq 'three') { print "THREE"; }

Proposed code:

switch($a) { case "one":print "ONE"; case "two": print "TWO"; case "three": { print "THREE"; } # Brackets are optional }

8. More comments /* */ and //