On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 12:15, Larry Wall wrote:
> On 31 Oct 2002, brian wheeler wrote:
> : I agree considering, this isn't APL and the problems people have had
> : mailing examples (let alone creating them!).
>
> Nevertheless, it has already been decreed that Perl 6 programs are
> written in Unicode. That's not gonna change...
>
Fair enough. However it seems the world isn't ready for unicode
operators. Ok, maybe its me that's not ready. Being a boring American
from the midwest I don't need no stinking French quotes! :) The fries
are good, though.
Anyway, I think that this is a good discussion (despite there being too
many threads to try to follow) and an important one. However,
considering I've spent the last 45 minutes trying to figure a quick way
to enter french quotes into my mailer and editor without them both being
very different and without resorting to cutting and pasting is showing
me that there are big problems with my environment (redhat 8, emacs,
evolution) and I suspect I'm not the only one. Displaying the glyphs
has been ok, for the most part, but its been hit and miss, depending on
other people's configuration. Some tables of operators have had lots of
holes.
It seems that to write effective perl using the new features requires me
to change not only how I think in the language, but also how I use my
computer. I think this might be too big of a leap for some. Unless
there's a compromise. Which brings up a question I hesitate to ask:
will there be the equivalent of trigraphs to cover the non-ascii
characters used? While ??< is a terrible substitute for {, it did get
the job done when people weren't able to press the '{' key. It gave
some visual clue as to what was going on, and was fairly easy to
remember. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to use @Straße for an
array, but it gets bad if when instructing others I have to pull some
voodoo key sequence (especially one which is different for each platform
and/or program being used) in order to get the job done. Explaining
emacs' M-x was bad enough for some of the non-programmers in my
organization.
I'm going to go back to lurking now, because I do trust (most) of you.
Though Dan is pretty odd sometimes. :) I know that all of this will get
resolved in a (hopefully) sane fashion. I just wanted to voice my
concerns.
> : I've got to admit all of these operators are scaring me. Seems alot
> : like Brooks' second-system effect.
>
> But that's our slogan:
>
> Perl 6 is second-system effect done right.
>
> :-)
>
But, doesn't *everyone* say that? :)
Brian
> Larry
