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.
>
>Larry
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.
Sure it's job security, but....
A badly-written C program is not nearly as hard to maintain as a
badly-written PostScript program, partly because PostScript is
so redefinable.
Maybe reading code written in a bad Perl syntax will be no worse
than reading a badly-designed and badly-written class module. I
hope that's the case.
No, you shouldn't hold back the development of the language simply
because people will abuse your efforts and write bad code. Just
please keep in mind potential abuses as you're doing your design.
A language with arbitrarily flexible syntax can be infinitely
difficult to decipher.
Thanks.
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Eric J. Roode [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Software Engineer, Myxa Corporation
