All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Perl Wishes for 2004

Ovid on 2004-01-03T21:50:46

In retrospect, I really don't want autoboxing for Perl. It seemed like a nice hack, but until I know what problem it solves, I don't see a need for it. The top five things I would like for Perl, however, are:

  1. A reentrant regular expression engine. I think could actually implement a proper predicate logic system were it not for this limitation.
  2. A clean OO model.
  3. "Defined or" ($foo // $bar; $baz //= 3) become part of the core.
  4. Method signatures (with method overloading).
  5. A built-in GUI system (preferably wxPerl).

Santa got me clothes, books, and sushi cookware instead.

Defined Or

triv on 2004-01-03T22:24:40

3. "Defined or" ($foo // $bar; $baz //= 3) become part of the core.


"Defined or" is already in 5.9.x.

Re:Defined Or

Ovid on 2004-01-03T22:29:28

That makes me happy. I heard it was going to make it into 5.10, so this is nice confirmation. It was also, I hasten to add, the only item on the list that I thought would actually happen.

Comments

rafael on 2004-01-04T10:04:57

1. Reetrant regexes : this isn't trivial and needs some effort to understand how the engine works overall. Volunteers welcome.

2. Are you implicitly saying that the OO model of perl isn't clean ?? ;)

3. Done :)

4. Scott Walters suggested recently that making stashes tieable makes it possible to implement method overloading on method signature (for a particular class).

5. Ain't gonna happen. Patches not welcome, for once.

Re:Comments

Ovid on 2004-01-04T18:57:05

I shan't volunteer for the re-entrant regex fix as my C-fu is weak and when we tell scary stories around the campfire, someone always brings up someone's journey into the regex engine's depths. I'd rather perform a colonoscopy on a flatulent pachyderm.

It's a shame, though. without reentrant regexes, the utility of (??{}) is severely limited. If it were fixed, we could open up an entirely new class of programming.

And I would never say that Perl's OO model isn't clean. Why, I just think it's oodles of fun tracking down an accidentally overridden private method :)

Re:Comments

rafael on 2004-01-04T19:27:21

Er, IIRC the camel is a ruminant, so colonoscopy must be more difficult on them than on pachyderms.

Re:Comments

Ovid on 2004-01-04T19:52:10

You know, I wasn't even thinking about the Camel when I wrote that. It would have been much more funny if I had. Phooey.