On 6/18/05 12:23 AM, Adam Kennedy wrote:
>  The reason we ended up at ./method was simply because it was the best
>  suggestion anyone had.

That's what I'm trying to remedy :)

>  It's other advantage is that (except for on nordic keyboards) dot and
>  slash are generally right next to each other, so the expense of using it
>  is two chars and one fingering position, as they would likely be hit by
>  fourth and fifth fingers (for touch typist style) and some other two
>  fingers for the rest of us, and only 1 cm travel for hunt and peck.

As I noted, . and : are also right next to each other.  Yes, there's a
modifier (shift) for one of them, but I didn't see anyone crying when .: was
originally proposed, and .:: is just a double-tap on the 2nd key.  IMO, the
"RSI index" is basically a wash between .: and ./.  The "ugliness" and
"appropriateness" indexes, OTOH, heavily favor .: and .::, IMO.

BTW, I'm still not sure which will be more common, private or public
implicit-invocant method calls.  I assigned .:: to private because it simply
looks "more internal" to me.

>  And I dislike having a THIRD sigil even more than I dislike the second.

Objective-C has some spare characters if you're feeling adventurous :)

    [.method()] # ha, jk
    .-method()
    .@method()

Hm, that last one actually isn't half bad, the mnemonic being "call this
'at' the current object"...or something.  Again, maybe it's not feasible due
to parsing constraints.

How about resurrecting the spirit of the arrow?

    .> method()

That actually looks more "private" to me.  Let's line 'em up again:

      PUBLIC      PRIVATE
    ----------  ----------
    ./method()  .:method()
    .@method()  .:method()
    .> method()  .:method()
    .:method()  .> method()
    .:method()  .::method()

I'm just trying to get some more suggestions out there "on paper," because
it seemed to me that the old thread jumped from ^ to ./ with less
exploration than I'd like.

-John