Hacker News Reader

Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

is it mind boggling? depends on what you mean

Every time I look at an example I am turned off and my mind is in a way "boggled" ...

I just opened the tutorial on the Raku site I see this

   say looks_like_number "foo";

I find this awful,

right from the beginning, the say turns me off, computers do not speak, at least I really hope the computer is not actually speaking when I type that. Then there are the weird rules of quoting to not quoting ... I can't quite tell the rules are

the example is unpalatable, why does the looks_like_number word have underscores? is that a odd variable name that needs underscores? but it looks like a message to the user, what a terrible choice either way!

what does this print? I can't tell ...

View on HN

Well, in a way this is funny. As far as I can see, that example is taken from the page describing the differences between Perl and Raku (https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#CPAN), and how you can use Perl inside Raku using the Inline::Perl5 module, and how you can load a Perl module that exports a "looks_like_number" subroutine, and use it from Raku.

The example for "looks_like_number" has probably be chosen, because many experienced Perl programmers are familiar with that.

In Raku, you can use kebab-case, and if there would be such a routine in Raku, it would probably be called "looks-like-number", and return a Bool, as in either True or False.

"say" is also builtin in Perl, at least for the past 12 years or so. And if you are on a Mac, running "say this is your computer talking to you', it will talk to you.

In any case, the thing you appear to refer to, is in no way a tutorial, but rather documentation intended for a specific group of people: Perl programmers.

I mean that for instance you can define what the language should look like. It has meta programming and dialect functionality.

I mean things like https://youtu.be/7Ivoh-fzDw8 , https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60510667/how-can-i-defin... and https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Raku_Programming/Grammars

  > right from the beginning, the say turns me off, computers do not speak

This seems a bit of an odd argument. You've never heard the phrase "The sign says ...", or asked someone "What does the error message say?"

That said, `say` is just a normal function, and you could always bind a new function and use that instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com