in reply to Re^3: perl6 or not perl6 ...
in thread perl6 or not perl6 ...

What counts is that idiomatic Perl 5 is very different from idiomatic Perl 4 in architecture, whereas idiomatic Perl 6 won’t be nearly as different from idiomatic Perl 5

Really? Many of the (already frowned upon) idioms are abstracted into functions or operators. This takes away a lot of the (in)famous line noise.

Perl 6 does not really reform the way systems written in Perl are to be architectured

Really? Of course, you can still use the same architectures you used in Perl 5 (as you can still use the architectures you used in Perl 4), but there's a wealth of new paradigms entering the language, with roles hopefully shifting around the idiomatic OO landscape forever. That's just one example, but there are many more architectural possibilities new in Perl 6. Many of which go further than the addition of references, namespaces and lexical variables. (It's not entirely accidental that I name three features that PHP does not have. People manage to use PHP and Perl in much the same way, while PHP lacks these things. Try, to use roles, hyperoperators, or environmental variables, in Perl 5 or PHP...)

but in spirit, Perl 6 is much closer to Perl 5 than Perl 5 is to Perl 4.

Agreed, but then, so is Ruby, which is fortunately not called Perl.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

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Re^5: perl6 or not perl6 ...
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Mar 12, 2006 at 03:22 UTC

    The OO stuff is what I precisely was referring to when I said Perl 6 will just make things a whole lot easier to build by providing default mechanisms that would have to be built manually Perl 5. Class::C3, Class::Trait, NEXT: all built in or easy to achieve, and more powerful and flexible. But you do have all of those in Perl 5 in some form – it just takes way more effort, which most people are unwilling to expend (hardly surprising).

    Really, if you think the Perl 6 we have now should have been called something other than Perl 6, then what kind of language should have been called Perl 6?

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

      Really, if you think the Perl 6 we have now should have been called something other than Perl 6, then what kind of language should have been called Perl 6?

      That's a very interesting one, but only answer I can honestly give is that Perl's time is up. It has been for a few years. Perl 6 could be a rewrite of Perl 5 with some extra features, for those fanatics who keep using the language.

      Update: Wrote that when I was in a bad mood. I probably shouldn't have written it, even though it does reflect how I often feel about Perl.

      Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

[reply]
        If Perl's time is up then obviously it's getting less important and we would do better to rehuffmanize its name to something longer like, say, Perl 5.10 or some such...

        But hey, that just frees up the perfectly good four-letter word "Perl" for other uses. :-)

[reply]

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