Tom Christiansen wrote:
>
> How nice of you to put words in my mouth. Please cite me the precise
> message ID, date, and appropriate text in which I said "we can't
> change anything because of precedent".
First off, I wasn't trying to insult you, or push a hot button, or
suggest we should destroy Perl. Anybody notice I retracted RFC 147
because of this?
So I'm sorry if you took it as an insult. My apologies. But I did feel
that by this:
> There are thirteen years of precedent, not to mention the
> millions of users, who are completely accustomed to writing
> expressions like...
You were essentially saying "Nope, =~ ain't going away. Live with it.
End of discussion."
If so, that's fine. But I don't think that's a decision to be made at
this point. I'd rather Larry and whoever else (I'm sure you'll probably
be a close advisor) weigh the finished RFC's, say "Naw, that's just too
radical. It's not Perl." And discard it later.
My only goal is to make Perl *BETTER*. A lot of criticism - both mine
and external - is not of TMTOWTDI but *inconsistency*. Think for a
second, and you'll see there's no reason we need a =~ or !~ operator. We
don't! This operation can easily be handled by a builtin function.
That's what spawned the RFC.
But Perl is mature. People are used to how pattern matching works. If
you read the bottom of the RFC, I actually note that a *lot* of thought
should go into changing something so fundamental.
So much, in fact, that I would *never* suggest removing =~ and !~ from
the language. No way. At the very least they'll have to be
backwards-compat syntaxes for the new builtins.
> Here's something you can quote, however: You cannot hope to just
> mutate absolutely *everything* willy-nilly and still expect that
> the language should keep the same name. It's not fair to anyone.
I agree. In fact, if you read most all the RFC's I've submitted, with
rare exception they change minor things (like STDOUT -> $STDOUT, for
example). Or things that most users won't see. Or add new functionality
that doesn't hurt anything currently in existence.
> Having to write m// is needlessly burdensome, flying in the face
> of thirteen years of experience and millions of users.
I agree completely with you that // should be special-cased still. I
disagree that m should be mandatory. DWIM.
> I have a long list of changes, things I'd like to see *fixed* in
> Perl, but virtually none of which anybody here has ever even managed
> to mention.
Frankly, Tom, I'd love to see an RFC from you. :-) I'm busting my butt
trying to think of good ideas, but there's virtually no way I'll think
of the *same* ideas as anyone else. So I'd love to see some of them
codified, at least briefly. We can pick up the ball and fill them in in
discusssions, but at least a brief RFC from you would help a lot.
-Nate
