in reply to Perl 6 feature that scares me the most:

The whole concept of Perl 6 frightens me. I fear that I'll have to relearn large chunks of the language. I fear that I'll have to do a major porting effort on my existing code should Red Hat, Sun, or SGI decide to ship with Perl 6 instead of 5. It's not so much that I fear change, just big change.

The rational part of my mind tells me that if I took an afternoon and read the relevant web pages, I'd probably find that it's not going to be so bad. Thing is, that part of my mind also tells me to go to the gym, eat salad, and study C, so it clearly can't be trusted.

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

  • Comment on Re: Perl 6 feature that scares me the most:

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Re: Re: Perl 6 feature that scares me the most:
by jqb (Novice) on Jun 04, 2003 at 18:14 UTC
    The whole concept of Perl 6 frightens me. I fear that I'll have to relearn large chunks of the language. I fear that I'll have to do a major porting effort on my existing code should Red Hat, Sun, or SGI decide to ship with Perl 6 instead of 5. It's not so much that I fear change, just big change.
    It would be a disaster if installing Perl6 broke all Perl5 scripts. Since Larry has no desire to author a disaster, he has mandated that Perl6 be compatible with Perl5. The compiler will only go into Perl6 mode when encountering some Perl6 construct, like 'module'.
[reply]
      I'd consider it a disaster if installing perl 6 uninstalled or overwrote any install of perl 5. Installing one won't automatically preclude installing the other, and I fully expect that anyone shipping a perl 6 install will ship a perl 5 install as well, at least for quite a number of years. (Much the same as when folks shipped perl 4 and perl 5 simultaneously)

      I personally don't plan on running my working perl 5 programs under perl 6 for anything other than testing purposes--they work, disk space is cheapish, and I loathe breaking things without a darned good reason.

[reply]
        I believe that when I see it!
[reply]

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