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Postings from May 2001
Michael G Schwern writes:
: On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 11:55:36AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
: > If you talk that way, people are going to start believing it. The
: > typical Perl 6 program is not going to look very different from the
: > typical Perl 5 program. The danger of us continually talking about
: > the things we want to change is that people will forget to notice the
: > tremendous amount of stuff that we aren't changing.
:
: It might be useful to draw up a list of functions and features which
: we don't plan on changing? Maybe just run through each Perl 5 man
: page and highlight everything that will still be the same and post
: this somewhere?
By the time I do that, I'll have written all the Apocalypses. I'd prefer
to leave the subtraction to others. But just looking at what we have
so far, and discounting the foreshadowning stuff that actually belongs
in subsequent Apocalypses, I don't think the look and feel have changed
all that much. The biggest visible change will probably be in how
the typical subroutine's arguments are declared, and that's something
we've been planning to do for Perl 5 for years. And you'll certainly
still be able to say sub foo { my $self = shift; ... } if you prefer.
But it'll probably run slower than something with a compile-time visible
signature.
Another big shift is the notion that @array, %hash, and &func produce
references in scalar context without the need for backslash. But
that's actually simplifying how arguments will be declared, so that we
don't need a ton of special prototyping rules for the common cases.
The generalization of that to at least one form of list assignment is a
no-brainer.
You guys are certainly free to carp all you like, but I'm also gonna feel
free to say what I would like to see in the next version of Perl.
Larry
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