An interesting Perl 6 idea

Anyone reading the perl6-language list has seen the varied (almost 100% positive) reaction to Larry's latest talk (which I am looking for a transcript to).

As some of you may know, perl 6 is going to be in some ways a drastic departure, and in other ways a subtle change. One of the ways that has been suggested to manage this is to maintain both a perl 6 and a perl 5 binary on disk so that perl 5 stuff will never be broken. Some things of note that will be broken:

@foo[5]
[download]

Apparently some people like doing this. Even a friend of mine likes to write code that way. Not me. At any rate, there is talk that we should remove some of these inconsistencies from the syntax and semantics to make perl more clear and less breakable.

I havent quite decided what the merits are of relegating perl5 stuff to a perl5 binary, but a preliminary judgement of the idea is that I like it a lot.

I'd really like to know what other people have to say about this. For the curious, the archives of the list are on dev.perl.com.

brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

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Re: An interesting Perl 6 idea by petral (Curate) on Apr 06, 2001 at 09:50 UTC
I havent quite decided what the merits are of relegating perl5 stuff to a perl5 binary, but a preliminary judgement of the idea is that I like it a lot. Yea, but did you see this from Ed Peschko (and related comments) in this thread: If perl6 is designed correctly, then it should be extremely easy to target multiple, differing syntaxes. TMTOWTDI on a grand scale.. And what would be a better way of testing this out than being able to make perl6 parse and run perl5 code correctly? Ed p	[reply]
Re: An interesting Perl 6 idea by extremely (Priest) on Apr 06, 2001 at 09:38 UTC
I'd rather we not have a old binary around. I don't want to get into the whole which version is that module installed for mess. I'd rather the MetaLanguage deal win out and we get a perl6 that can emulate perl5 at a moment's notice. Much better, even if I have to add -6 or something else to the shebang line to get perl 6 to act like perl 6. Use 6.0 isn't bad, either... -- $you = new YOU; honk() if $you->love(perl)	[reply]