At 09:16 AM 4/27/2001 -0400, Eric Roode wrote:
>Larry Wall wrote:
>
>[wrt multiple syntaxes for Perl 6]
> >
> >In any event, I'm not worried about it, as long as people predeclare
> >exactly which variant they're using. And I'm also not worried that
> >we'll have any lack of style police trying to enforce Standard Perl 6.
>
>As a member of a consulting group, I am very often called in to
>enhance or maintain (or just plain fix) existing code for clients.
>
>My concern is that it will not be enough simply to know Perl; that
>I will have to be able to decipher many user-defined variants of
>Perl. Bad Perl code is easy enough to write and difficult to read,
>let alone change. And bad Perl code is terribly common. I'm worried
>that poorly-designed Perl syntaxes will start popping up, further
>obfuscating poor code, and that will be one more burden for those
>of us who need to fix it.
This is the only thing I worry about with perl 6's redefinable parser.
(Well, from a user-level at least) Combined with easy access to CPAN, it
will make it terribly simple to have several flavors of perl handy, which
can make maintenance rather dicey.
It's also the one reason that I really like the idea of policy files of
some sort, to allow sites that don't want this sort of thing to forbid it.
I'm not talking things like perl automagically loading policy files in.
Rather having "use site_policy;" set limits that can't be undone at all
easily, or something like that. Site management can mandate its use and
wield the appropriate baseball bat if it isn't followed.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
