On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
Another interesting tidbit we've addressed here:
Was the syntax appropriate for declaring variables to give appropriate hints to a hypothetical compiler? That is to say MY INT $X or MY STR $Y -- and I thought that the INT and the STR and the NUM should be suffixes, something like MY $X:NUM-and, in fact, that suffix syntax is something that Larry officially has blessed, but just not for this purpose.
What struck me about that paragraph is that if I understand the comment correctly, Larry is choosing a mapping from a specific syntax to some purpose (unspecified in the excerpt) while an otherwise well-informed Perl user (Chip) 'naturally' wanted to map said syntax to a different semantics. When this happens in Python-land, Guido says "nope, neither". --david