Why we will use obj$func() often

[Greg Ewing]

Mark Hahn wrote:
> The whole point is to make things simpler, more readable, and more
> efficient, but when people see the & symbol they somehow automatically think
> it's complex.

The feature itself might not be complex, but it's
unfamiliar, since it's not quite like anything in any
other language they're likely to be familiar with.
So it makes learning the language a more complex
exercise, since it's one more new thing to learn.

It's also something that will be quite rarely used,
and is totally non-suggestive of its meaning, so I
expect people will be looking it up in the manual a
lot before it finally gets internalised.

On the other hand, replacing it with a keyword such
as "outer" would make it highly suggestive, to the
point where I'd wager most people wouldn't have to
look it up at all.

This is a big advantage that words have over
punctuation -- you have much more scope for choosing
one that means something to people.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg