There is no one so smart that they can’t be wrong.

Not all dialogues use sigils in the same way. ↩

I think you mean “dialects”?

It’s strange that someone would call you a degenerate because you happen to find Perl more readable than Python. Topics like sigils tend to evoke very subjective responses. To me, the capital letter stands out very clearly from the lower case letter, even after 10 years of IRC usage. ;)

Hungarian notation has a few issues as far as I can see:

1. Any change in a variable’s type, intention, and/or scope always requires a set of code changes.
2. In the case of type, it further increases the annotation requirements of already annotation-heavy languages (i.e. C, C++, Java)
3. Many current IDEs make it irrelevant
4. It is very heavy compared to the benefit gained by using it.
5. It’s bolted onto the host language and therefore not even supported intrinsically.

But, Charles Simonyi is a million times smarter than me, so maybe I’m wrong, but Hungarian Notation has a twinge of OCD to it.

-m

Personally, I find Perl much easier to read than Python, Clojure, or Scala (and CLISP, ML, OCaML, too), and it’s not because I use Perl every day (I don’t). That hasn’t kept the local Python evangelists from calling me a liar and a degenerate, alas.

Thanks for the post, honestly I have never seen Perl sigils explained in that way, but my experience with it has been brief. While I can see your point, I am not sure that I can see the distinction between my current understanding (datatype category) and your approach. In fact, when reading Perl code I was essentially doing what you describe. Don’t get me wrong, I respect Perl and admire the people I’ve worked with who can speak it fluently — but my mind has trouble digesting it in the same way that it can with Clojure, Python, or even Scala. -m