Do you know that Perl 5.0 actually had less syntax than Perl 4? It had more generalizable syntax, and was mostly backwards compatible, but it had fewer actual

Do you know that Perl 5.0 actually had less syntax than Perl 4? It had more generalizable syntax, and was mostly backwards compatible, but it had fewer actual syntax rules! Useless trivia. Both the . and the -> notations for OO programming have their roots in C. If foo is a struct, and bar is a property of the struct, foo.bar pulls that property out. If baz is a pointer to foo, then baz->bar does likewise. In Perl the . was already taken for string concatenation, so -> was the next reasonable choice. And the analogy is surprisingly exact. For example if $foo = $bar = {} then calling bless($foo) will also bless $bar since both are just references to the actual object. As for lots of ways to say the same thing, TIMTOWTDI was an intentional goal.