Re: String Literals, take 2

On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 01:42  PM, Joseph F. Ryan wrote:
> James Mastros wrote:
>> We need to decide if this is a user doc or a developer doc/language 
>> specification.  If it's the later, we need a regirous defintion of 
>> what a pair is.
>
> I'm more inclined towards a user doc; a rigorous definition of pairs in
> the tests should be good enough for the developers.

I think we've been gravitating to a "language reference", geared 
primarily towards intermediate/advanced users.  Something much more 
rigorous than beginners would be comfortable with (since it defines 
things in much greater detail than beginners would need) and written to 
assume *no* prior knowledge of Perl5.  It will be useful to the 
developers -- in that it will describe required P6 behaviors in much 
greater detail than the Apocalypses and Exegesis -- but it will be 
written for users.

The document should be taken to mean "we aren't describing how Perl6 is 
implemented or what the guts look like, but the language behaviors 
described herein should always be true."


>> Do we want to change shorthand octal literal numbers to 0o123 (I 
>> don't like this, it's hard to read), change octal chars to \c123 
>> (can't do this without getting rid of, or changing,  \c for 
>> control-character), get rid of octal chars entirely, or somthing 
>> else?  (Baring a good "somthing else", I vote for killing octal 
>> chars.)

As of Larry's last writings, there will definitely be an octal (it 
still has good uses), and it's syntax will definitely be 0o777 -- with 
an 'o', not a 'c'.  The 'o' is a little hard to read, but the best 
anyone can come up with.  It has to be lowercase 'o', not uppercase 
'O', which helps *enormously*.  :-)

(But since I assume you can use \d, \b, \h anywhere you use \o, you 
won't have to use octal at all if you don't want to.)

MikeL