In my daily wanderings, I came across the Rindolf discussion which has sprung up over at use.perl.org and noticed that some fellow monks have too found this discussion and contributed to it - For those unfamiliar with this thread, Shlomi Fish has proposed a Perl 5 based dialect in direct counterance to some of the directions for change proposed for Perl 6.

In this thread, Shlomi Fish is quite vocal on some minor (and some not so) criticisms which some have with Perl and proposes to address these in this offshoot language. Specific criticisms and directional specifications raised include:

1. The -> operators and . will remain the same as in Perl 5.
2. Classes will be declared with a class { ... } construct and several can exist in the same module.
3. An on_destroy() primitive that calls a callback when it is garbage collected.
4. Globs will be replaced by return values.
5. local is gone. Long live my() and our().
6. Distinction between => and ,. No more possible hashes mishaps.
7. Re-organization features: easier stubs programming, a better garbage collector that can handle circular references, Full Unicode support.
8. A command-line switch that toggles proper tail recursion on and off.
9. Factories: setting the default behaviour of Perl in an Object-Oriented way. You can keep several same settings at the same time, and they will be de-allocated when they go out of scope.
10. Unambiguous x operator.
11. General Depreciation of the scalar() context. scalar(@a) will be replaced by count(@a). Reversing a string will be performed by a function other than reverse()

 

To my mind much of this proposed direction for Perl 5 is a flight of fancy, particularly given some of the follow up comments in the thread where Shlomi Fish admitted not fully understanding some of the aspects of the language proposed to be changed - However, this discussion has raised some interesting questions to my mind ...

 

• Are you happy with the directions proposed for Perl 6? If not, why? What direction will your coding take beyond the Perl 5 realm? I'd be interested to hear from some who like Shlomi Fish are positively unimpressed with the proposed direction for Perl 6.
• And prehaps more interestingly, what behaviours of Perl 5 would you like to change if given the chance?

 

perl -e 's&&rob@cowsnet.com.au&&&split/[@.]/&&s&.com.&_&&&print'

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