Re: Next Big Step for Perl 5

The emphasis on evolution, however, makes me wonder if we are likely to see certain changes in "traditional" Perl any time soon, that make it a better language by removing out-dated features such as bareword behaviour, obscure magic punctuation variables, and the like

Yet it's those "out-dated" features that make Perl Perl. Perl is also about backwards compatability. If you have an urge to work with a language without "out-dated features", there are two options: Perl 6, or Kurila. Well, and the "work in perl5, don't use what you don't like", but I guess that's a bit too simple and obvious.

IMO, removing features isn't progress at all.

Comment on Re: Next Big Step for Perl 5

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Re^2: Next Big Step for Perl 5 by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 23, 2011 at 21:49 UTC
IMO, removing features isn't progress at all. Hi! I wrote a patch for Perl 5 a couple of years ago which added a `class` keyword. You'd think that'd be an easy change to the lexer and tokenizer, but I had to work around the Perl 4 package separator code—you know, the one that you only ever see in Acme modules, and then infrequently. Yes, that's the same feature that's been deprecated since Perl 5.000. Now I understand not everyone might ever want a better syntax for declaring classes or methods or object attributes or regular expressions or file handling or function arguments or whatever syntax other people might want, but think about that. Adding a keyword to the language (without even worrying about whether it's doable in a backwards compatible way) requires working around features deprecated since the first release of Perl 5.	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: Next Big Step for Perl 5
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 23, 2011 at 21:49 UTC

IMO, removing features isn't progress at all.

Hi! I wrote a patch for Perl 5 a couple of years ago which added a class keyword. You'd think that'd be an easy change to the lexer and tokenizer, but I had to work around the Perl 4 package separator code—you know, the one that you only ever see in Acme modules, and then infrequently. Yes, that's the same feature that's been deprecated since Perl 5.000.

Now I understand not everyone might ever want a better syntax for declaring classes or methods or object attributes or regular expressions or file handling or function arguments or whatever syntax other people might want, but think about that. Adding a keyword to the language (without even worrying about whether it's doable in a backwards compatible way) requires working around features deprecated since the first release of Perl 5.

[reply]
[d/l]