Re: RFC 181 (v1) Formats out of core / New format syntax

> Have you also looked at Damian's Text::Autoformat, which has a renewed format
> implementation that looks *very* good a candidate for replacing perl 4/5's
> format.

Yes, I have. It's actually very powerful. I've actually been meaning to
talk to Damian about this, because at one time he had mentioned
proposing a modification of it to replace Perl's formats. In which case,
this would obviously be integrated here.
 
>         write [format_name] [filehandle];
> 
> I don't know if I want a comma there, I think yes, but ...

Well, if we did it this way, what we'd actually want is:

   write $FILEHANDLE $FORMAT;

The reason is this could use Perl's indirect object notation:

   $FILEHANDLE->write($FORMAT);

Automatically. Plus, it preserves the current write() syntax intact.
This is what I was going to put in v2.

> If there is a need for migration anyway, look at Damian's implementation again
> and add new functionality at the same time, like footers.

Agreed. I wanted to get the basic idea out there so people could start
thinking about it.
 
> >    my format $FILE_FORMAT =
> > @<<<<<<<<<<<<<:  @<<<<<<<<
> > $name, $ssn
> > .
> 
> And get rid of the '$' too. If it's feasable in your mind to do it in the
> perl6 parser, it would also be possible to move that to the perl5-perl6
> converter.

Can't do that. This syntax simply declares a lexical variable
$FILE_FORMAT of type format, which is a special variable class that
could compile formats for use by write. Removing the $ would be a bad
idea; it would special-case one variable name in one specific instance.
Both filehandles and file formats should be $scalars in Perl 6.

-Nate