Re: Alternative to ~= for inequality?

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

"Joseph Manning" <manning@cs.ucc.ie> writes:
>>>     Nooooooo!  Please don't Perl-ise it.
>>
>> "Perl-ise" o.O You gotta be kidding. That's the only language you know  
>> with != ?
>
> No, sorry, I was not very clear -- many other languages indeed use "!=",
> but I was referring to Perl's "there's more than one way to do it" style

But what makes Perl unique is not the _presence_ of multiple ways to
do some things (every language has those), but rather the number of
such ways, and an apparent _policy_ of having them.

Adding a few very minor redundancies (like "!=") to fix historical
quirks in Lua isn't "perl-ising."

I don't think "~=" is bad because it's hard to type (I use an American
keyboard layout).... I just think it's a fairly pointless and
sometimes annoying inconsistency with many other popular languages.
It's one thing I _still_ often get wrong even after many years of
programming in Lua.

Note that is _not_ true of other differences like "{ }" vs. "... end";
Lua's control-structure/block syntax is both easy to remember (indeed,
one can hardly forget), _and_ has real benefits.  "~=" on the other
hand seems to have no obvious benefits at all over "!=", and because
it's used much less often, it can ... slip, especially if also doing
much programming in C / Java / whatever.

-miles

-- 
Cabbage, n. A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a
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