Damian Conway writes:
> My (limited) understanding of the aims of Perl 6 were to start again with a
> clean slate and fix the things that are broken, or that could be designed
> better with hindsight. Backwards compatibily was to be fed to the lions.
Larry's the one who will decide what goes into perl6, and I'm speaking
here as Nat the Perl Hacker not Nat the Project Leader. So understand
that what follows is not holy writ, but a mere mortal's understanding.
I would be surprised if perl5 programmers didn't feel at home in
perl6, so I'm not expecting lots of massive changes to the language.
I doubt int/string/etc typing will be mandatory. I doubt dollar signs
will disappear. "If you want Ada, you know where to find it" still
rings as true today as ever. You'd need pretty convincing arguments
to get any of those changes through.
That said, if you can make a convincing argument for a feature's
inclusion then do so. The types of arguments that are likely to win
over Larry (I'm guessing) are things that make easy things easier,
hard things easier, or previously impossible things possible.
So while backwards compatibility should not be an issue in the
brainstorming process we're in now, this doesn't mean that perl6 will
be unrecognizable. Nor is this merely thinking of new things to bolt
onto perl5. Some of the most important changes will be underlying
structural changes (e.g., internals, corners of language syntax) that
make some previously hard things easier (extending with C,
pretty-printing, run-time ability to optimize for memory or speed).
Larry, is this what you had in mind?
Nat
