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Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that just a half-assed mandatory Hungarian-notation system? :-/

I mean, sure, in Perl the language "casts" the value into an appropriate type for you, but only in a few select cases..

It is pretty similar to Hungarian notation, but it also denotes context. But is it half-assed? I'm not sure. It expresses the type of the variable over a very narrow set of types. If anything you could say that the type system is half-assed. I've thought a lot about this over the years and I have come to believe that it is really a minimal type set that offers an incredibly useful set of abstractions.

For me, the main advantages of sigils are that I can immediately see if I am looking at a variable or a function name and that the sigil effectively separates the name spaces between functions and variables. This has the side effect of making it easy to distinguish functions that have been passed in as variables from functions declared or imported into the particular scope.

Even with a nice IDE I miss the distinction that the sigils provide.

Yes, I definitely miss this in Ruby since it also has optional parens for method calls but lacks sigils. Even the most basic-looking expressions can have arbitrarily complicated meanings:

  foo.bar = 1

Is that just an attribute set on an object, is it calling a method foo that returns an object containing a bar attribute with a normal getter/setter, or is bar= a method that has arbitrary functionality?

I also like the more explicit operators in Perl that help show context:

  $foo + $bar

This is specifically numeric addition and those operands are probably at least somewhat number-like. Yes you can potentially overload it, but by convention, it will still be something like addition, so you don't have to wonder if you are adding, concatenating, appending a list, or something else, because they have different operators.

Well, making it enforced by the runtime answers at least one obvious objection to Hungarian notation.

Yeah, I mean more in the information it carries for the human reader than its effect on how the machine sees it.

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