Does anyone know, what is the actual reason behind "dollar variable notation" in some of the scripting languages, i.e. PHP or Perl? Python creators did not find $variable useful, neither do I. Why does PHP and Perl force me to press shift-4 so often?
(OK, in Perl you can somehow explain it with distinguishing $scalar, @array and %hash but still it could be successfully avoided there, type does not need to be explicit)
They use it when parsing so that variables can easily be distinguished from other stuffs.
Dollar notation in script languages - why?