Comment by psychoslave

4 hours ago

>Why would (.class have to be a thing?

It doesn’t have to in the absolute. It just that if some speech seel that a programing language is completely object oriented, it’s fun to check to which point it actually is.

There are many valid reasons why one would not to do that, of course. But if it’s marketed as if implicitly one could expect it should, it seems fair to debunk the myth that it’s actually a fully object language.

>Is space dot class a thing?

Could be, though generally spaces are not considered like terms – but Whitespace shows it’s just about what is conventionally retained.

So, supposing that ` .class` and `.class` express the same value, the most obvious convention that would come to my mind then would be to consider that it’s applied to the implicit narrower "context object" in the current lexical scope.

Raku evaluate `.WHAT` and `(.WHAT)` both as `(Any)` for giving a concrete example of related choice of convention.

>Such syntax is merely for producing an AST and that alone doesn't mean "object" or "not object".

Precisely, if the language is not providing complete reflection facility on every meaningful terms, including syncategorematic ones, then it’s not fully object. Once again, being almost fully object is fine, but it’s not being fully object.