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From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perlscript as login-shell
Message-ID: <64781359@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Date: 21 Feb 91 08:12:15 GMT
References: <PERF.91Feb13001253@osiris.efd.lth.se> <11418@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1991Feb17.171303.20400@NCoast.ORG>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Distribution: comp
Lines: 12

In article <1991Feb17.171303.20400@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
>I've been thinking about the $^x business, Larry.  How about changing the
>special variables to be normally-named variables in package Perl?  That way,
>the debug flags, for example, might be $Perl'debug_flags instead of $^D.
>It's more readable --- and, much more importantly, you won't run out of
>variables.

Naturally, losing the short names would break most existing scripts, BUT
I still like the idea of having verbose, descriptive names!  They could
essentially be aliases for the short forms: $. <-> $Perl'line_num and so
forth.  New, weird variables might be introduced only in the new form
rather than try and scrape up another one character symbol.