On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 12:10:13PM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote: > > 1. Perl is not an open system. There's only one source tree for Perl, and > the API is still under Larry Wall's control.
Yes, for Perl5, there's currently one source tree. But this wasn't true in the past (Perl on for Windows; macperl), and isn't true for perl6. For perl6 there are currently two ongoing implementations: Pugs, implemented in Haskell, and Parrot, a virtual machine for dynamic languages implemented in C. The fact that there's one source tree for Perl has several not unrelated causes: Perl is a moving target; there's no formal specification; perl is complex, there just aren't enough people who are both willing and knowledgable to do another implementation of Perl. There's probably also less reason to have more than one Perl implementation than there is to have more than one Unix implementation, or more than one C compiler. OTOH, there is PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), a C library implementing Perl style regular expressions. As for the API under Larry Wall's control, perl5 is maintained/developed by p5p, an open mailinglist where anyone can send in patches, propose change, etc. A handful of people have commit bits, and one person acts as chief executer officer. A function that rotates. I'd say that Perl is an open system. One is free to write a another implementation - and you can freely use the current source code to seed your implementation. Abigail
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