Dots, dots everywhere

According to Tom Christiansen:
> It's a perennial *Active*State* request.

Just because AS passes the request on, doesn't mean that they're
responsible for it.  I brought up the dot thing, not any AS employee.
And I brought it up largely for my own sake.  I'd like to make object
interfaces easier to use...  Not to work with MS, but to work with
CORBA, and therefore Gnome and KDE.  Common punctuation should be
simple, and generic OO interfaces are getting to be very common.

Consider: Much of Perl's syntax is designed to be familiar to those
who already know other languages.  Anyone with background in C, Bourne
shell, C shell, awk, etc. has a leg up learning Perl.  But the general
population of programmers who could benefit from Perl is no longer
skewed quite so heavily toward Unix, C, and the rest of Perl's roots.

Therefore, as we are reconsidering Perl's language design, it makes
sense to work *with* pervasive conventions, rather than fighting them.
And it shouldn't matter where the conventions originated.  No idea is
so good that you can't find stupid people in favor of it.
-- 
Chip Salzenberg              - a.k.a. -              <[email protected]>
"I wanted to play hopscotch with the impenetrable mystery of existence,
    but he stepped in a wormhole and had to go in early."  // MST3K