in reply to A great talk on Perl6

Just as a point of practicality, will Perl5 modules be compatible with Perl6? Can I run Tk on Perl6? If not, what changes are needed to make current modules compatible?
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

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Re^2: A great talk on Perl6
by emilbarton (Scribe) on Apr 02, 2014 at 13:10 UTC

    As I could understand it *most* of the Perl5 syntax can be handled by Perl6 but not all of it, for instance a hash key is now written %h{key}. In general, contextual polysemy has been tracked and destroyed, this is what Conway calls Huffmanization.

    Besides there are many new features that make the old Perl style verbose and messy in comparison. Youl'll find native
    - iterators,
    - Moose-like object constructors,
    - generalized operators for method calls and parameter passing,
    - type checking in subroutines,
    - direct interpolation,
    - subroutines trying (as in C++),
    - overloaded and user-defined operators,
    - and Unicode builtin.

    This is why modules have to be translated in some way. One can find many modules - like CGI, DBI etc. - already available under the Rakudo project, unfortunately as far as I know Tk isn't imported yet, nor any other GUI.

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Re^2: A great talk on Perl6
by raiph (Deacon) on Apr 03, 2014 at 04:44 UTC
    If by "will Perl5 modules be compatible" you mean "is that the plan?" then yes, the plan is that you'll be able to use most perl 5 modules (including ones that use XS) via an embedded libperl on platforms where that works and you'll be able to use most pure perl 5 modules otherwise via the P6 project called "v5".

    For a little more detail about these plans see the bit about "Mixing P6 and ..." in this post.

    »ö« . o O ( "the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult?" )

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      The plan was for 5.8 to be the final release of Perl, so why would anyone care what the plan is?

      Why can't you be honest, Ralphie-boy? "The plan" is for your weird little marketdroid posts to keep promising that "something" is almost certainly "just around the corner", hoping that people forget that you pull this stunt year after year after year.

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Re^2: A great talk on Perl6
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 02, 2014 at 18:54 UTC
    Yes, you are looking for a project called PONIE.

    Except it's been dead for years.

    So #perl6 will start rewriting it again in the future. Then kill it. Then rewrite it. Then announce that they're going to rewrite it and try to kill it but let it linger on and then write a compatibility layer five or six different ways and half-arse it onto several different backends.

    And then several years later, they'll tell you that it has a real user. They just can't tell you who it is or anything about it. But it has a real user and it's not vaporware, they promise, and it'll be done THIS YEAR FOR SURE and why don't you read their conference presentation and their blogs hosted in Wordpress because they're too busy drinking and rewriting things to figure out how to use Rakudo for anything as mundane as web programming.

    After all, it's a language designed to rewrite compilers, slowly and poorly.

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      It's a language designed to replace Java and C++ but waiting for good management and workers.
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        > It's a language designed to replace Java and C++ ...

        Hence not one to replace Perl5? ;)

        Good to know ... xD

        Cheers Rolf

        ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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        Fourteen years of waiting for good management and workers, you can predict it'll wait forever.
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