>I don't understand this desire to not want anything to change.
You misread.
>This is an
>opportunity to clean up the language, make it more useable, and more fun.
>I would have a lot more fun if perl were a better performer and if it was
>easy for me to expand it, contract it, reshape it, improve it, etc.
Bah. You start from false premises, and go on to fantasize
bucolically about motherhood and apple pie.
You will *not* improve the performance of the inner interpreter
loop by having fewer opcodes to switch on. Whether the number is
20 or 200, it's the same thing--*think* aboutit. Furthermore, It's
been demonstrated that this supposed "gain", including in size, is
negligible. I have yet to see one iota of justification for denuding
perl of its math functions. If math functions should be removed,
then so too string functions. And that binmode silliness is in
line before any of them, since it's absolutely useless because I
never use it.
See what I mean?
Perl is *not* fun when it supplies nothing by default, the way C does(n't).
If you want a language that can do nothing by itself, fine, but don't
call it Perl. Given these:
* Scalar manipulation
* Regular expressions and pattern matching
* Numeric functions
* Array processing
* List processing
* Hash processing
* Input and output
* Fixed-length data and records
* Filehandles, files, and directories
* Flow of program control
* Scoping
* Miscellaneous
* Processes and process groups
* Library modules
* Classes and objects
* Low-level socket access
* System V interprocess communication
* Fetching user and group information
* Fetching network information
* Time
Your brain-damaged Perl would likely end up having nothing in it but these:
* Flow of program control
* Scoping
Anything else would be fobbed off into back-of-the-bus modules.
But I tell you this: your whole language will get fobbed off as
a pain in the royal ass.
Since day 1, perl has been useful because it's had so much in it.
You don't want a language with a whole bunch of the commonly needed
functions *already* in it, fine -- but it's not going to be perl,
and it's not going to be useful.
--tom
