On Tue, 08 Aug 2000, Peter Bevan wrote:
> However, with the birth of the new Perl, I think it is time to bury those
> ideoms in the language and
> start inventing new ones..
>
Two words: "New Coke"
I think that Perl survived its first through fifth births because the
idioms it chose to implement were familiar.
One could conceivably create a semantically pure language with
no platform or OS dependencies, but then no one would use it.
Creating new idioms is fine. I'm all for it. If you can do it in a
language, why not do it? What's wrong with map{} in a void context?
;-)
Be careful destroying old idioms out of spite, or just because you've
created a new one.
In most cases, you haven't created a replacement, but a substitute.
There's a difference.
> Error handling should be supported by it's own keyword
i.e.: >
> trap {
> #CODE
> }
> release (error) {
> # ERROR
> }
>
> (just because I didn't want to steal throw and catch)
Why not? Throw and catch are familiar to programmers.
Creating brand new vocabulary may potentially hinder a Foo->Perl and
Perl->Foo transition for someone. Use what people know.
(Today, one of my coworkers couldn't understand why 'next;' wasn't
working in a C++ while loop.)
>
> Timeouts, shouldn't be reliant on UNIX. (Although I dont think they should
> be in the language eigther. A system is easily developed using threads.
> something which I hope to develop when perl6 is ready...)
>
I don't understand this paragraph.
--
Bryan C. Warnock
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
