On Wednesday, September 27, 2000 4:17 AM, Tom Christiansen
[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> This is screaming mad. I will become perl6's greatest detractor and
> anti-campaigner if this nullcrap happens. And I will never shut up
> about it,
> either. Mark my words.
Quote from Larry: "I have a particular distaste for the sort of argument that
goes, 'If I can't have it my way, I'm going to take all my marbles and go
home.' That's not an argument--that's nuclear blackmail. I'm the only one who's
allowed to make that sort argument, and you'll never hear me making it."
On the other hand, I have to agree with the core sentiments. All this talk
about nulls and strong types and everything-is-an-object is frankly scaring the
willies out of me. Maybe perl does need a revamp, but it should still stay
perl. I'm a perl programmer, not a Visual PerlBOLthonajaffellispQL++ robot.
Perl has always stood on these:
There is more than one way to do it. (Public/private OOP?)
No arbitrary limits. (Everything is an object? Exceptions getting in the way of
open(FILE,"file") or die "$!\n"? Hard typing?)
We're very proud of our language that doesn't force us to put an if before or
after a statement, and doesn't care whether we indent one tab per block level,
and doesn't belch out exceptions at us if we forget the ungodly mess of
exception classes, and allows sheep to sleep and die if I feel poetic. Perl is
Perl. It isn't Java. It isn't C++. It isn't Python (thank goodness). Maybe
there are a few nifties we can borrow from those creations, but twisting the
language inside out to make it closely resemble something second or third or
fourth best is quite distasteful. We're improving a language here, not creating
a new one.
Again from Larry: "At the moment, I'm not only trying to follow along here; I'm
also reading all the books on computer languaes I can get my hands on--not just
to look for ideas to steal, but also to remind myself of the mindset Perl was
designed to escape."
and nate: "If you want Ada, you know where to find it"
There are a lot of good ideas in these RFC's. Lot of wishing it was language X
too, which I can't see as a good thing. Map to null, work around the problem.
It takes, what, one line of code to do so? This isn't C where it would take 20
or C++ where it would take 200.
But having a real switch statement... that's been on the table for years now...
and having parseable regex syntax, fine.
