On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 11:39, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > I think we also need to be skeptical of the false economy of putting > such sugar into CP6AN, if a sizable portion of the community is going > to download it anyway.
A more interesting question is *when* to put something into the core language or libraries. Consider Perl 5, where File::Find is a core module. While the interface may have been nice in 1995 (though I doubt even that), it's been widely regarded as awful for at least three years. It's likely never to be removed from the core. File::Find::Rule is immensely nicer. Good luck convincing a pumpking to replace File::Find with File::Find::Rule. For that even to be considered, File::Find::Rule will likely need a backwards compatible interface. Good luck convincing someone to write it. Every module or idiom entrenched in the core in Perl 6 will likely stay there until Perl 7, unless it's an exceedingly bad idea such as 5.005 threads or pseudohashes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of quite bad ideas entrenched in Perl 5 that cannot be removed. While it may be true that this or that construct is clearly the best way to do something, it's worth asking that the idea prove itself in the wild world outside the core for a while *unless it absolutely positively cannot be done without core support*. Good ideas can be added in future versions. Improving module and code installation is one part of that puzzle. Allowing local grammar redefinitions and macro support is another. In my mind, that relieves a lot of the pressure to ship the entire workshop by default. Again, once something goes in the core language, it has to be amazingly positively unquestionably broken to be removed. Merely bad things have too much staying power. -- c
