As if a change in the name of Perl 6 would be needed for Perl 5 to continue to live. The community of people who keep on maintaining Perl 5 is large, the ecosystem is healthy, problems are solved. Plenty of people (but more are welcome) cooperate between Perl 5 and Perl 6. | [reply] |
As if a change in the name of Perl 6 would be needed for Perl 5 to continue to live
I look at it the other way. I think Perl6's best chance of survival is to keep the "Perl" in its name, and I think Larry recognized that - which is the reason that he opted for the "Perl 6" name in the first place.
I think he realized that, without the Perl 5 association, there was a good chance that the new venture would fail - thereby exhibiting his lack of faith in the ability of his new programming language to stand on its own merits.
(This is the only sensible explanation of the name choice that I can think of. Do you have an alternative ?)
So ... I guess that if Perl 6 takes off I'll be wondering whether it's because of the smart name choice, or because it really did have the wherewithal to stand on its own merits.
I don't really care about the correct answer. All I know is that, for me, Perl's great strength is XS and Perl 6 doesn't have that.
Cheers,
Rob
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But Perl 6 has the Native Calling Interface which allows you to "Call into dynamic libraries that follow the C calling convention". This means that if you're using XS for accessing external libraries, you won't have to use XS. Which I think a lot of people would see as a plus.
For example, this is the code to interface with the C-function ctime:
use NativeCall;
sub the-time(Int() $it = time) { # coerce to Int, cu
+rrent time default
sub ctime(int64 is rw --> Str) is native {*}; # the actual interf
+ace
my int $time = $it; # the rest is synta
+ctic sugar, really.
ctime($time) }; # the actual call i
+nto the C-library
}
say the-time; # Sun Jul 15 17:05:34 2018
And if you want to interface with your own C-code: turn it into a small library and call that using NativeCall. The t/04-nativecall directory contains several examples of how to do this.
All in all, I'd say not having XS is a plus, rather than a minus. As it is XS out there in the wild, that is keeping Perl 5 from advancing in the multi-threaded world.
Which is also why Perl 5 ithreads continue to have scalability issues for the past 15 years! | [reply]
[d/l]
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At the time it was "named" no one expected it to take so damn long and stray so far off the original. No lack of faith or intent to piggy-back on an established trademark. Originally it was supposed to be a new, improved and slightly incompatible version of the same language and all would be well if it worked out like that.
Jenda
Enoch was right!
Enjoy the last years of Rome.
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