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But surely Perl's $_ was way more influential than an obscure PG talk. I was reading PG way back in 2004, and I had never heard of anaphoric macros until now.
by earthboundkid 7y ago
But surely Perl's $_ was way more influential than an obscure PG talk. I was reading PG way back in 2004, and I had never heard of anaphoric macros until now.
- kragen 7y agoWait, you think that, in the context of programming language design, a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk? I don't know what to say about that. It might be possible for you to be more wrong, but it would be very challenging. Anyway, I'm talking specifically about the use of the identifier "it" in Kotlin, not implicitly or contextually defined identifiers in general, which are indeed a much more widespread concept, embracing Perl's $_ and @_, awk's $0 (and for that matter $1 and $fieldnumber and so on), Dyalog APL's α and ω, Smalltalk's "self", C++'s "this", dynamically-scoped variables in general, and for that matter de Bruijn numbering.
- earthboundkid 7y ago> a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk Compared to the existence of Perl, yes. Anyone who does any amount of Perl learns that $_ is the implicit argument ("like 'it'") to most functions. It's pretty much one of Perl's main deals. The talk has about 100K views on YouTube, which is pretty good, but Perl is in another league.