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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Perl 6 To Be Complete Rewrite (But Not What You Think) 21 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • As inforamtion becomes available, I will put it up at the blessed Perl 6 information source. [perl.org]
  • So it won't be C++ ? Regards Alex
  • Like most other things that is not decided yet.

      - ask
    --

    -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();

  • Why is he missing from the initial list of porters?
  • It is not decided, but I cannot imagine it will be C++. I think too many people would rather have C.
  • What initial list of porters? There isn't one.
  • There is a first list of volunteers on www.perl.org. At this time, Sarathy has not volunteered for a particular role in Perl 6, but has not commented on why. Everything is still in the early stages of organization, so you should not infer anything from omissions.
  • No inferences were intended.
    I have been a lurker on p5p on and off for years. Sarathy's contribution to the current state of Perl is deep and wide. I hope he has the time and willingness to contribute to the re-write, given his experience.
  • Please... correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Larry Wall state that there wasn't going to be a perl 6? That the numbering would continue past 5.9 to 5.10 ...etc...
  • Larry might have said that, I don't recall. He did say that there may never be a need for it, but that was assuming the perl internals were sufficient to make Perl extensible and embeddable. That assumption appears to be widely questioned now.
  • Don't forget -- perldoc perlhack
    Larry's power as Supreme Court is expressed in The Rules:
    1 Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.
    2 Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at a later date, regardless of whether he previously invoked Rule 1.
    Got that? Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.
  • I hope that the rewrite works out - it's not everyday that something as widely used as Perl is redone from scratch. I'm also hoping that the internals will be reworked with an eye to producing executables from Perl code - or allowing Perl to [insert-fave-language] translators to be plugged in to the backend.
    --
    Chris
    Humchuckin' Buddachunk
  • Yes, I agree.

    But my point was that the whole idea is to remove all assumptions, start from a blank page and get the best possibly language and implementation out of it - so by princip we don't know yet. :-)

      - ask
    --

    -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();

  • Why not write perl in perl?
  • So they're really writing Perl 6?

    Ah, the moment many people have been waiting for...the chance to advance their own modest proposals for re-syntaxing perl. Gosh, I've been hatching those since 1991 or so. :-)

    I'll spare you my own ideas, but I think anybody interested in this project should look at Damian Conway's spectacular efforts to save C++ from its own syntax, namely A modest proposal: C++ Resyntaxed (postscript) [monash.edu.au]. Since Conway is something of a perl insider, I'm kind of hoping he'll have a hand

  • I forwarded this question to Sarathy. Here's his response.
    I consider myself to be still very much in the big Perl picture.

    However, I'd also like to enjoy a brief "sabbatical" after three years in the hot-seat, if that is at all possible. I've always wanted to scratch the itch of doing cool things _with_ Perl rather than _to_ perl. I'm still hoping this may be the best time to start scratching. :-)

  • He also said that Perl was finished because it's out of characters for special variables. He has always had the right to be wrong and the right to what's wrong. See the Artistic License....
    --
    Do spiders make gravy? Do earwigs make chutney?
  • Because Perl is an applications language, but the Perl implementation is a systems programming job.
  • Granted, but what about using perl as a C*
    code generator instead of writing C+ by hand?
    (Also see my posts on the bootstrap list.)
  • Generating C from Perl is like generating C++ from Smalltalk. The impedance mismatch between VM models is too great for effectiveness. IMO, of course.
  • What went wrong with the design of the perl 5 internals, or maybe the question is, what went wrong with the maintainance of the internals 5.000.

    I remember when Larry Wall used to write on comp.lang.perl about what he was working on for perl5. And yes, he said many times that there shouldn't (not wouldn't) need to be a perl 6 if perl 5 became what he thought it should. That the rewrite of the core was more modular, etc. and so the language could be extended through modules and XS rather than having to rewr

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