in reply to Perl 6

As far as I understand, backward compatibility with Perl5 (not Perl4) is an issue in develloping Perl6 and the RFC process. Those things that went into Perl5 for backward compatibility with Perl4 will surely disappear. The latest doc mentions which commands are depreciated. Also if you post code, the monks will tell you if you use such code. So by the time Perl6 will come, you should be able to use it with only minor changes here & there, as little already pointed out.

neophyte

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Re: Re: Perl 6
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jan 15, 2002 at 04:10 UTC

    Unfornatly, that turns out not to be the case. You can convert perl5 to perl6 fairly easily in terms of code flow and such. However, changes like . to _ for concatanation and -> to '.' mean that you'll have to change all you code.

    Have hope, though. Perl6 should be powerful enough to redefine operators. That means "use perl5" should be able to be written in fairly simple perl6 and be able to provide the perl5 semantic of -> (mostly) and '.'.

    Thanks,
    James Mastros,
    Just Another Perl Scribe

[reply]
      Rumor control time.

      Perl 6 will, for the most part, work just fine if you accidentally feed it Perl 5. Larry Wall made this design decision clear right from Apocalypse 1. This is, in fact, not an optional decision. There is a tremendous installed Perl 5 code base, and it would be suicide for Perl 6 to not support it in a natural and direct fashion.

[reply]

        My bad. (I'm still rather curious as to how he's going to accomplish that, but <shrug>. I can't wait for Apocalypse 3.)

        Thanks,
        James Mastros,
        Just Another Perl Scribe

[reply]

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