Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Apocalypse 5 on Regular Expressions Posted 12 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • That is a big one to swallow.

    I like A5, but it is dramatic. It will piss off alot of hum-buggers.

    Mostly, it makes me wonder how long it will take to build perl6. Much of my apprehension is allieviated by the thought that perl6 will not show up in my lifetime :)

    • Re:Oh shee-it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Damian (784) on 2002.06.05 1:02 (#9143)
      I like A5, but it is dramatic. It will piss off alot of hum-buggers.

      You really think so? I can't think of any significant way in which Larry's proposal isn't a vast improvement on what we have now: more readable, more consistent, better optimized for the common cases, more powerful. What do you think they'll object to? (That's not a rhetorical question: I'd really like to know.)

      Mostly, it makes me wonder how long it will take to build perl6. Much of my apprehension is allieviated by the thought that perl6 will not show up in my lifetime :)

      Wow, I sincerely hope you're wrong about that! I'm expecting to see a usable beta some time next year, and I'd hate to think of you shuffling off this mortal coil so soon! ;-)

      • Re:Oh shee-it (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pudge (1)
        Well, if I were inclined to object, I would object about the fact that it is too different. I don't, in general, like different.

        OK, that's an oversimplification, but I just woke up. In any event, though, I am far more interested in the Perl syntax than the Perl regex syntax. My primary concern with regexes is the learning curve and speed of execution. It's a very dissimilar situation to Perl syntax itself, to my mind: I mean, how many people are really in love with Perl regex syntax, really?
      • What do you think they'll object to?

        Backwards compatibility with Perl 5 people can get used to, as they use less Perl 5. Incompatibility with egrep, vi, mod_rewrite, et al could be harder to overcome. They aren't all completely compatible at the moment, but at least things like character classes are similar. I can see people not liking having to learn a completely different regexp syntax just for Perl.

        It also depends on how many other languages pick up Perl 6 regexes. It'd be bizarre to find Java an

        • Yeah... character classes were also number one on my list of "things that I'll miss knowing how to do in Perl6".

          I know they'll still be there, but the syntax will be different -- and pretty much all other regex languages will still allow [aeiou], only Perl6 will require <[aeiou]> (or perhaps <vowel>?). So I won't be able to carry over my knowledge directly.
          --

          -- 
          Esli epei eto cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
          Aettot ibrec epesecoth, spakhea scrifeteis.

          • I actually think that
            <vowel>
            might be pretty cool. But how would you handle "sometimes Y"?

            I suppose if any language could do it, Perl could...

      • I haven't read A5 yet as perl.com has just taken a nice nosedive.

        My reaction to the first four (though I usually need the Exegesis to make sense out of some bits :) has been, well, not negative so much as fearful.

        It may be perl, but it's clear that it's radically different. While I don't have a huge stack of legacy code I'm concerned about, I've done perl long enough that when I think of a problem, I think of it in perl. Changing the syntax of the language on me now would be like someone announcing "OK,

        • I haven't read A5 yet as perl.com has just taken a nice nosedive.

          Remove the www from the URL. http://perl.com/ works for me, http://www.perl.com/ doesn't. HTH.

      • Many people perceive anything new as "more complicated", and have the reaction "oh, gawd, what a pain, I'll have to learn all this new junk, Larry and Damian are horrible people who want to make my life miserable for their own sadistic enjoyment". You've seen this already with the reactions to A1-A4.

        Not much to be done, but a page or so of examples of the type "look how little most of your simple cases are going to change, .* isn't going anywhere, take a deep breath, everything's going to be fine, there

      • When you say 'optimized', I don't think you mean what you think you mean. It's syntactically optimized, which is good for some things, but time will tell how much slower the bells and whistles make the engine. Time will also tell how many years we will continue to wait.

        This is either the best thing to happen to the regular expression engine since the invention of *, or the most profound and breathtaking example of Second System Effect since the invention of J2EE (or COM+ if you swing that way).
        • But, "syntactically optimized" might be just the thing! I'm not going to get much faster or smarter in the future, but I'll almost certainly be using a faster computer with more memory.

          So, if Perl 6 lets me be faster it should work out for the best.

          Of course, I might behave like the majority of projects out there and just add more variables, more data, etc (think of the US National Weather Service), and end up still having a slow process.

          :^)
      • You really think so? I can't think of any significant way in which Larry's proposal isn't a vast improvement on what we have now: more readable, more consistent, better optimized for the common cases, more powerful. What do you think they'll object to?

        Again, I like it. In my mind, it is a whole New Thing(tm). It is lex-yacc replacement built into Perl, and intimately tied to Perl. Regex's have always been a language with a language. Clearly, Perl5 regexs were going in the grammer direction. However, I can'

Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.