On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > But we can run an experiment. Warnings can be made default for the
> > first few releases of Perl 6 and we'll see what happens. If it looks
>
> Ummm, I'm not too sure about this. There are, actually, backwards
> compatibility concerns. Unless I'm mistaken, warnings go to stderr,
[example snipped]
> the program. So to do this effectively and transparently p52p6 should
> really stick a "no warnings" in a p5 script to make sure that stderr
> isn't polluted. But then we're back to where we are now....
I would tend to agree that old (i.e., <6) scripts should work
exactly as they did before (or as closely as we can manage). However, if
someone runs their old scripts through p526, that shows a commitment to
the Perl6 track which implies that their new development would be in
P6. The implication, to me at least, is that if we have p526 insert "no
warnings" but all scripts written fresh in Perl6 have the warnings on by
default, then we can get the best of both worlds. And, and M. Schwern
suggests, we could try it for the first version or two and then solicit
community feedback to see what people think.
On a different topic, I for one am not thrilled (FWIW) about the
idea of having a config file which sets site-wide policy for default
switches are on by default; it represents another detail to keep track of,
it could potentially represent a security hole, it's an
"action-at-a-distance" effect, and there will still need to be some
builtin "default" switchs (or lack thereof) to cover what happens when the
config file doesn't exist or can't be read.
Dave
