On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 03:10:13PM -0700, Nate Wiger wrote:
: Larry Wall wrote:
: >Well, we thought about opening it up like that, but we really kinda
: >need to establish what is an official part of the "long name" for
: >uniqueness purposes, and try to avoid too much visual clutter in
: >standard usage.
:
: Going with that... I would think that the "official" part is really just
: the module name. Are there lots of problems with CPAN collisions between
: different authors? No. People just choose a slightly different name if
: their preferred one is taken.
Now imagine that process applied to a CPAN that 20 years old and 200
times as big. We're trying to avoid the equivalent of DLL hell here,
and I think this is one are where .NET got it pretty much right.
: It seems the biggest problem is requiring *only* a specific version, or
: range of versions, or <= a version. I know this is addressed already.
We can squabble about the syntax, but the basic components of the long
name are all pretty important.
This is one of those accomodations to the real world, like everyone
agreeing on a standard URI format. We're really trying to keep
these module names close to what you'd see as the name of, say,
the corresponding .rpm file. These modules have to have names that
work outside of Perl as well as inside, and {...} isn't going to fly
in general.
: Not trying to rant (really), but one thing that is starting to bother me
: about Perl 6 is that there's lots of changes that require special syntax
: for one specific instance. It's making it really really difficult to
: remember or generalize, two things that I thought we were trying to improve.
Well, you're painting with kind of a broad brush here. If you can
point to other areas where we could usefully generalize without
getting too abstract for newbies, I'd be delighted to hear them.
Much better to spot our limitations now than later, even if we
decide we have to keep the limitations for some reason.
Larry
