At 11:16 AM 4/9/2001 -0600, Dan Brian wrote:
> > This one here's been bugging me for a bit. Larry never said that perl 6
> > would assume its input code was perl 5. Perl 6 will always assume its
> input
> > is perl 6. The said (and I'm still trying to dig up the quote) is that
> > we'll be enabling warnings and strict by default (as opposed to the off by
> > default now) if and only if perl can tell it's parsing code for a module.
> > (Via the "module" keyword)
>
>Actually, the quote in "Apoc1" reads:
>
>--- That is, Perl 6 must assume it is being fed Perl 5 code until it
>knows otherwise. And that implies that we must have some declaration that
>unambiguously declares the code to be Perl 6.
I must've been looking at an older rev or something, and I'm pretty sure
Larry's talked about this sort of thing elsewhere. Perl 6 is a new release
of perl, it's not a completely different language. Perl is, still, perl.
>Without throwing more hornets into the nest, I think it's worth
>considering that by and large, most people using both perl6 and perl5 will
>opt to differentiate right on the command-line or #!. I know I will. It
>isn't *that* difficult to keep 2 local interpreters lying around. Or 3; I
>still have a perl4 somewhere.
Or four or five... I think at this point you can throw a version or two of
Tcl and Python on the ubiquitous interpreter heap.
Still, I'll be really, *really* surprised if most perl code require any
rewriting to run under perl 6. TomC's got quite a cache of old perl code,
and I've got some mildly hairy perl 5 code that I want perl 6 to eat
without complaint.
>I understand why lots of people freak when considering that perl6 will be
>totally different. But I don't. Simple migration is good. Legacy at the
>cost of innovation is not.
Yeah, but innovation at the cost of legacy's not a great idea either. Don't
forget we have an enourmous legacy base--every single person who programs
in perl now. This is probably our last chance for a big language upheaval
for quite a while, but that doesn't mean that we're actually going to have
that much of one.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
