in reply to Will/Can Perl 6 clean up the bit-wise operator precedence mess?

Forking Perl's precedence rules from those of C would be a mistake.

It is part of Perl's philosophy that Perl is based upon C. When one reads Camel 2 (the version Merlyn co-wrote) one sees that adopting C's precedence rules was a deliberate decision in order to enhance Perl's C-ishness. Merlyn, LW and Tom Christiansen wrote in the 2nd chapter:

Note that any operators borrowed from C keep the same precedence relationship with each other, even where C's precedence is slightly screwy. (This makes learning Perl easier for C folks.)
It also makes learning C easier for Perl folks.
  • Comment on Re: Will/Can Perl 6 clean up the bit-wise operator precedence mess?

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Re: Re: Will/Can Perl 6 clean up the bit-wise operator precedence mess?
by Vynce (Friar) on Jun 03, 2001 at 01:27 UTC

    <diatribe>
    yes, but when they wrote that, perl was still a sincere second banana to C. to my mind, this is no longer the case; there are hordes of perl programmers who will never learn C or C++ because they have no need to. and, as i further understand it, perl6 will no longer be written in C. how much longer whould we encourage an artificial resemblance in the language?
    </diatribe>

[reply]
      as i further understand it, perl6 will no longer be written in C

      I think you may be confusing Perl 6 with Topaz.

      --
      <http://www.dave.org.uk>

      "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
      and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[reply]
        I thought that Perl 6 will largely be written in Perl 6, allowing the base that needs to be implemented natively be as small as possible.

        Furthermore I heard that there will be multiple implementations of that base, including ones in C, C#, and the JVM. (Or at least that is a pipe dream that people had at one point.)

        Even if the most commonly used implementation of Perl 6 was written in C, this would make it true in spirit and fact that the overall language is not written in C any more.

[reply]
      and, as i further understand it, perl6 will no longer be written in C

      What will it be written in? C++ has the same operator precedence as C, so I assume you mean something besides that?

[reply]

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