Why we will use obj$func() often

[Greg Ewing]

Mark Hahn wrote:
> Well I have a problem now.  I gave people on my mailing list a choice
> between $var, `var, ~var,  and ^var.  The current tally is four votes for
> $var and none for any of the others.  According to your criteria, $var is
> the worst and ~var should be the best.  Am I correct?

Not necessarily. It can be very hard to analyse these sorts
of things, since people who have an opinion tend to know what
appeals to them and what doesn't, but not why. The pattern
recognition processess involved seem to happen in a part of
the brain that's not accessible to introspection.

My feeling is that ` and ~ are too inconspicuous, $ is
too conspicuous, and ^ has the wrong sort of connotations
(it looks like it's pointing to something somewhere else,
rather than at "myself").

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