I agree with japhy -- I wish you would have introduced yourself to some of the others of us who were there as well (not that japhy and I met each other either, but that was more logistics than intent).

Now, about the whitespace: it may be a reasonable assumption that someone new to the language would want to see his/her whitespace interpreted literally, but doing so is almost always going to be suboptimal; I would speculate that 90% of the time or more, the new user is actually using literal whitespace when he/she really wants either \s (to match spaces AND tabs) or \b (to match a word boundary, whether it be beginning/end of line, whitespace, or punctuation). So, by forcing the initiate to be explicit about what kind of whitespace he/she is looking for, perl 6 is cutting down the debugging load and trying to impose good programming style.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com

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