The number of Perl 6 RFCs hit 161 today. The 150th was Extend regex syntax to provide for return of a hash of matched subpatterns by Kevin Walker, and the latest, 161, is OO Integration/Migration Path by Matt Youell.
New Perl 6 mailing lists include
perl6-language- sublists objects, datetime, errors, data, and regex. perl6-bootstrap is
being closed, and perl6-meta is taking its place (the subscriber list will not be
transferred).
personally...
superwix on 2000-08-26T00:27:22
I like this idea. that damned 'feature' has been annoying me for years.
btw, why on earth is anonymous posting turned off? That totally defeats the point.
Re:personally...
pudge on 2000-08-28T11:59:18
What "point"?
Eeek!
shufgy on 2000-08-28T22:57:24
The more I read about Perl 6 the more I worry about it.
Lots of the rfcs seem make trivial changes to things which will break existing scripts.
Lots of people are going to be annoyed even if Perl 6 is the most amazing thing ever.
Tell me this won't happen?
Re:Eeek!
pudge on 2000-08-29T12:14:33
I am not sure what you want assurance of. That Perl 6 won't break things? Yes, it will. Larry said that Perl 6 will probably break more than Perl 5 did. While Perl 5 didn't break much, that just says that yes, there will be breakage. Yes, it will annoy some people. The goal is to make Perl 6 as good as possible while annoying the fewest people possible. We can only try to control the former and mitigate the later.
Re:Eeek!
Illiad on 2000-08-29T21:46:33
In order for perl to grow, there need to be changes to some of the fundemental ways which perl does things.
As I understand it, one of the reason's that it's damn-near impossible to write a compiler for perl code which can actually compile some real-world scripts, is that the underlying design of perl5 makes it very difficult to separate specifics of the runtime vs parse vs compile stages.
(not that I think a compiler is a good thing.. but still..)
The danger is - Yes it's entirely possible that Perl 6 could break alot of things, or be an almost totally different language than what we have right now. Personally I think this is highly unlikely, because part of the reason we have so many RCFs is that the process for developing and designing this upgrade to perl is left open.
It never really was closed, but with the perl 6 track it's been set up in a much more formal open design system relying more on proposals and responses from the community to spearhead development.
In the end, I suspect, the only things that will "break" in perl5 are things that we - the perl user community - deem need to break to move on with the language.
Changes always piss people off. I suspect Perl 5.x will be around a long long time...
Re:Eeek!
shufgy on 2000-08-30T13:29:07
As I understand it, one of the reason's that it's damn-near impossible to write a compiler for perl code which can actually compile some real-world scripts, is that the underlying design of perl5 makes it very difficult to separate specifics of the runtime vs parse vs compile stages.
Sure but tell me that changing @ARGV to @ARGS is due to compiler issues?
Changes always piss people off. I suspect Perl 5.x will be around a long long time...
Changes that are unneccessary or unreasoned.
shrug
We'll all see what happens when we see some code and yes I'm sure that lots of the things will be cleaner and so on. I'm just sceptical at the moment.
Re:Eeek!
pudge on 2000-08-30T15:35:15
Sure but tell me that changing @ARGV to @ARGS is due to compiler issues?
Yeah, but who says that is actually going to happen?
Re:Eeek!
the way on 2000-08-31T02:58:51
We'll all see what happens when we see some code and yes I'm sure that lots of the things will be cleaner and so on. I'm just sceptical at the moment.
The P6 process is open to everyone. Read the RFCs and join a few of the lists and get involved yourself! You can't have any impact on the development by discussing it here!
Also, note that a P52P6 converter will be a part of P6. Changes that break P5 will generally be converted by this appropriately. There may also be a pragma for backwards compatability.
Re:Eeek!
pudge on 2000-08-31T12:10:11
The P6 process is open to everyone. Read the RFCs and join a few of the lists and get involved yourself! You can't have any impact on the development by discussing it here!
Sure you can. Talking about it with others certainly can and does impact the development. Will it have as much of an impact as being on the lists? I dunno; I guess it depends on what you say and who hears you.
Also, note that a P52P6 converter will be a part of P6. Changes that break P5 will generally be converted by this appropriately.
In theory.
