in reply to Re^5: Why Perl in 2020
in thread Why Perl in 2020

Was P5 really a rewrite of P4, or did you put it in "quotes" for irony?
No irony this time LanX. I was being deadly serious ... just as I was last time I got into heated arguments about the definition of "rewrite" vs "refactor" ... seems to go with the territory. :) Please note that Larry Wall at least seems to agree with me that Perl 5 was indeed a "rewrite" and not a "refactor".

Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community.

-- Larry Wall from Perl 6 archive

See the full Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VI): Architecture thread for gory details of many more heated arguments around the definition of rewrite vs refactor.

Update: Just noticed that tilly also agrees that Perl 5 was a rewrite of Perl 4.

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Re^7: Why Perl in 2020
by LanX (Saint) on Dec 12, 2020 at 02:37 UTC
    well ... it really depends on the definition of "rewrite" and the dictionaries are not helpful. °

    When in doubt, explain your point:

    I can hardly imagine reinventing Perl5 from scratch and keeping that degree of compatibility with Perl4, so he must have reused the old code base somehow (think of all those complex parsing rules alone)

    Perl6 on the other hand was recoded from scratch, AFAIK.

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
    Wikisyntax for the Monastery

    °) the German translations include both "reshaping a text" and "writing it new"

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