I'm sorry, but that seems somewhat arbitrary to me. When I want to know what an object is, it's very obvious to use .WHAT after you've been exposed to it in my opinion.
# perl6 -e 'class Person { has $!initials }; my $p = Person.new( :initials<KAB> ); say $p.WHAT'
(Person)
As for why all capitals, you can just as easily ask Python why double underscores. In the end, it's all language convention (explained here[1]). Denigrating something just because it's different is not a position I think has merit. If down the line we discover that these were bad choices, at least then there will hopefully be some evidence to point to.
> The word "what" is one of the most common English words - so the opposite of a better, explicit choice, like type, class, classtype, etc - and doesn't even mean "what-is" if you read it out loud. 3.WHAT doesn't sound like "What 3 is" - it sounds like "3 - I didn't hear you" or if you're being very generous it means "What is 3?" (asking for its value).
If you think WHAT in a programming language is likely to be interpreted as "What? I didn't hear you." then I submit that you are using libraries with very poorly named cutesy methods that the author should have really known better than to use if it ends up in in production. Given the context of a programming language, when would you ever need to call a built in metamethod (because it's all caps...) that meant "I didn't hear you" ?
Even when "what" is used in the context of "I didn't hear you" it actually is asking for information (to be repeated), and the "I didn't hear you" is the implicit part (otherwise why would you ask for the same thing be said again?).
# perl6 -e 'class Person { has $!initials }; my $p = Person.new( :initials<KAB> ); say $p.WHAT' (Person)
As for why all capitals, you can just as easily ask Python why double underscores. In the end, it's all language convention (explained here[1]). Denigrating something just because it's different is not a position I think has merit. If down the line we discover that these were bad choices, at least then there will hopefully be some evidence to point to.
> The word "what" is one of the most common English words - so the opposite of a better, explicit choice, like type, class, classtype, etc - and doesn't even mean "what-is" if you read it out loud. 3.WHAT doesn't sound like "What 3 is" - it sounds like "3 - I didn't hear you" or if you're being very generous it means "What is 3?" (asking for its value).
If you think WHAT in a programming language is likely to be interpreted as "What? I didn't hear you." then I submit that you are using libraries with very poorly named cutesy methods that the author should have really known better than to use if it ends up in in production. Given the context of a programming language, when would you ever need to call a built in metamethod (because it's all caps...) that meant "I didn't hear you" ?
Even when "what" is used in the context of "I didn't hear you" it actually is asking for information (to be repeated), and the "I didn't hear you" is the implicit part (otherwise why would you ask for the same thing be said again?).
1: http://doc.perl6.org/language/mop#Metamethods