At the risk of beating a dead and bloated horse, I have no doubt that I will enjoy and take advantages of the improvements in Perl6, but I still don't see the logic in changing operators. I mean, why make old code unusable? If you can make a Perl5->6 converter, why can't you integrate Perl5 code into Perl6? Like I said, I have no doubt that I will use the many new features of Perl6 and enjoy them, but I think that sums up a lot of the gut reactions of people that I have spoken to.
-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan E. Paton To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 4/4/02 3:01 AM Subject: RE: perl6 > what at hell should these changes help us? Iīm using perl 5.6.1 now for > a long time and I donīt wanna change my kind of writing my progs, only > because some mastermind thinks that he must change the good old!! There are many better changes, including: * Parrot (the interpreter) will be easier to embed. * Parrot will also make cross language integrate easier, XS will die. * Better exception handling mechanism, basically you choose whether fail means raise an exception or return something like undef and store message in a special variable. * A proper (and working) thread model * Better portability, Perl/Parrot is moving onto Palms/WinCE. * Definately better OO, unless you've done OO programming you won't appreciate how much ANY improvement means. Some pretty complex things need to be done to implement certain OO ideas, which breaks Perl's claim of making the difficult things easy, and the impossible possible. * More control over the optimizations applied. * Seperation of the Parser and VM will mean Perl will be easier to write alternative backends for (e.g. Perl->C, Perl->Java). Run Perl code on Java's VM, run Java code on Parrot. Perl 6 will be an improvement over Perl 5, but not alien to us. Remember, there has been 4 versions before Perl5... and every language needs to throw away the bad bits and introduce new features as things progress. Most importantly, Perl 6 wouldn't be as memory wasteful as Perl 5 is. I'm looking forward to Perl 6, not because I'm keen to drop Perl5 from my skillset but to add Perl 6 to it. You could learn a more stable language like C, but at the high price of being more difficult to program things in. Anyway, don't trust me, but read for yourself at: http://dev.perl.org/ Jonathan Paton __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all copies. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
