All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

HWXperl

jouke on 2002-09-27T08:56:18

I've just joined the HWXperl project. I first had some discussion with the mail developer Graciliano M.P. because I don't agree with some of the design principles of HWXperl.

HWX aimes to become an IDE for creating GUI applications with Perl. Well, as you may know, I'm into GUI programming with Perl, so a complete IDE for that is a great idea IMHO. However, Graciliano created a modified version of Perl 5.8.0, which excludes the use of PerlIO and -more importantly- it modifies Perl's behaviour for the dot. It uses the dot like Perl 6 will: obj.method(). And although I would like to use that dot for that, I think it's wiser to wait for the general implementation and not create different Perl flavours.
On the other hand, it doesn't break the concatenation really, since you can still use the dot for concatenation. It checks for the existance of the object and the method. If it doesn't exist, it just behaves as normal.

My part in the project will have nothing to do with this new syntax. I had already thought of creating a GUI design tool for wxPerl like jplindstrom's The GUI Loft exists for Win32::GUI.

I also suggested adding a wxPerl based visual debugger to the IDE, for which I will take a close look at Devel::ptkdb. And I will help with maintaining the platform independency by making everything work on Linux, whereas Graciliano develops his stuff for Win32.

Well, enough to do already I think....

wxPerl + The GUI Loft = fuzzy

jplindstrom on 2002-09-27T11:33:59

I've actually been thinking about including support for wxPerl in The GUI Loft. But there are a lot of things that needs to be done before that's a reality.

I think I need to really _know_ wxPerl before doing something like that, and that means writing an application or two for real.

Then it's the problem with dynamic vs static layout strategy. It may end up not being a problem, but it's may also be a deal breaker depending on the quality required on all platforms. I think I can go with "excellent" on Windows (because for normal users, that's the desktop OS) and "ok" on some obscure Unix windowing systems.

And then there's this thing with free time (or the lack thereof) :)

/J

The dot

jdavidb on 2002-09-27T16:39:41

If they want to change the functionality of the Perl language, the compatible way is to use a source filter. Surely a simple source filter can be created that will make the dot operator work the way he wants within a limited lexical scope.

I would not want to be responsible for maintaining a forked perl 5.8.0. Jarkko got out most of the bugs, to be sure, but some day I'm sure there's going to be a 5.8.1, and then what are you going to do? :)