On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Simon Cozens wrote: > Steve Simmons: > > We have said that perl5 will be *mostly* mechanically translatable into > > perl6. > > And we shall keep saying this until we believe that it is true?
As a Perl user (the kind of guy who uses Perl at work for everything humanly possible), I personally don't have a use for backward compatibility at all. If there's a cool P5 module that I just *need* in P6, I'll port the thing myself. At work I will install the latest P5 and P6 at the same time. If I need P5 I'll use it, otherwise I'll use P6. I personally believe that getting P5 compatibility in Perl 6 is entirely possible, but I would never use it and I would perfer that the massive amount of work that would go into it, go into something else, like porting popular modules (like DBI, etc) or just plain working on the core language to make it all that it can be. Furthermore, *if* enough people could be motivated into creating such a compatibility layer (many people have noted the slowness at which development is happening now), I can't believe that it would be complete enough to rely on in a production system, but to be fair I may be underestimating the community in that respect. I think that compatibility is a goal that looks nice on paper, but as someone who's "in the trenches" I don't think it will be that useful to me. - D <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
