* Peter Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [05/10/2001 10:55]:
>
> Eh, I fully understand that version number magnitudes are simply to attract
> attention, and that The Faithful don't need the glitz. Since AFAICT the
> glitz doesn't hurt, though, it doesn't do any harm to give marketing all
> the help it can get; and let's face it, marketing hasn't been Perl's
> greatest strength.
Another point in favor of something like this is that the proposed
syntax and semantics changes are getting so huge that I'm not sure I
would even call it Perl, frankly. Lists not being flattened, -> going
away, potentially replacing <FILE> with a member iterator on a
fileobject ($FILE.more). And while these changes may all be good in a
way, it reminds me of something Tom C said to me a while back. This was
a rather heated discussion, but I personally took it to heart and think
there's a lot of merit in what he had to say:
: http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-language-regex@perl.org/msg00079.html
:
: You cannot hope to just mutate absolutely *everything* willy-nilly
: and still expect that the language should keep the same name. It's
: not fair to anyone. If you want to make a language with a similar
: relationship to Perl as Scheme has to Lisp, then by all means do so,
: but note the wisdom of the name-change that the lispers pulled.
: Thus, there *is* fundamental merit in respecting and understanding
: the appeal of precedent. That is a *long* way from saying "never
: change anything".
:
: Where are the reasonable boundaries here? Well, although it's hard
: to say with inerrant precision, it's trivially easy to make a good
: stab at it. You just look at usage--how much has this feature
: been used? For how long (eg been there since perl1 vs just got added
: in perl5.003)? What is its prevalence in Perl scripts? Is it a
: rare feature (like formats) or a ubiquitous one (like hashes)?
:
: ...
:
: I have a long list of changes, things I'd like to see *fixed* in
: Perl, but virtually none of which anybody here has ever even
: managed to mention. You're all too busy giving the baby a
: brain-transplant than you are to trim his toenails. (And you
: forget that the baby is rather grown up now.)
Maybe the name "Perl" should be dropped altogether?
(Granted, that's not what I'd prefer, but the changes are getting
rather massive and are starting to really permute the proposed
language)
