On: Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?

[Roboprog]

The real WTF, in any language, is relying on precedence, rather than just using parens.

I've seen some expensive boo-boos due to operator precedence mistakes (e.g. - in C)

That said, there are a lot of special variables that can be tedious to figure out (e.g. - $" vs $;), if somebody uses the less frequently used ones, rather than the long-form names.

[berntb → Roboprog]

>> operator precedence mistakes (e.g. - in C)

Many years ago, I had a bookmark in my C manual (Harbinson Steele) for the operator precedence page.

After a while I removed that bookmark. I decided that if I needed to look at that list, I should use parentheses. :-)

[DonHopkins → berntb]

I could just drop my K&R C manual down on the spine, and it would always open up to the operator precedence page. No bookmark was necessary because I always had to open it to that page so often.

[Roboprog → berntb]

That's an important page - for reading other people's misguided cleverness.

[falsedan → Roboprog]

    man perlvar

was always pretty easy to search & explained the real purpose of whatever goofy line noise people would use

[Roboprog → falsedan]

Yep. That's where I found $" and the other one, whatever it was :-)

I can remember $_, $? and $!, but that's about it. And I like Perl.

[b2gills → Roboprog]

The only ones like that which exist in Perl 6 are $_ @_ %_ $! $/

The rest were either just abandoned or given names such as $GROUP or $PROGRAM-NAME

$/ isn't the same as it was in Perl 5 instead it is for storing the result of successful matches. ( you can also assign to it )

$0, $1, $2 is short for $/[0], $/[1], $/[2] $<abc> is short for $/{'abc'} which can be spelled as $/<abc>