On 10/20/05, Nate Wiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And, it shares alot with other languages people know and use.
That's more because languages are incestuous (like Perl) instead of languages independently arriving at the same conclusions. Yes, the "while" loop is going to look the same everywhere. But, the fact that everyone uses $1 to mean the first match has nothing to do with whether or not that's a good idea. The first engine did so, which means the next one probably will. > Right now the design is going towards something that's very very > un-Perlish from a syntax standpoint. Sure, the philosophy's there, but > there are fewer and fewer things Perl 6 shares with Perl 5 (or other > widely-used languages). I wholeheartedly disagree. You can take any piece of P5 code and, with very few modifications, have it run as native P6 code. You won't be using a ton of the greatest features, but we have that in P5. I once taught a programmer who'd been using Perl for over a year how to use hashes. I have an article coming up in early November on perl.com about how and why to use subroutines. Just because _you_ know about the feature doesn't mean the hoi-polloi do. Heck, I've been programming in Perl for almost 10 years and I have NEVER written a line of XS. I wouldn't know where to start. Frankly, most of the features in P6 look to be usable by 1% of the Perl developers, and then only about 1% of the time. Most of my P6 is going to be very vanilla. I'll take advantage of most of the new list operators and thoroughly abuse the class/role system, but I'm not going to be writing my own grammars or deal with $0/$1/etc. I don't deal with them now - I prefer named captures. The point is that if you want to truly clean off the cruft, you have to approach with a completely open mind. That open mind is going to piss off a lot of people and you will never do everything you were hoping to do, but the end product will be better off for it. You'll never reach the moon unless you shoot for the stars. Rob
