On Sat, Dec 24, 2005 at 11:25:43PM +1100, Andrew Savige wrote: : Apologies if I'm Mr Magoo, but I did a bit of a search on this just now, and : uncovered little more than a pithy quote from Piers Cawley in: : : http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/2005/p6summary.2005-07-05.html : : asserting that "Multiple implementations are good, m'kay". : : If anyone can point me to where this is discussed in the official Perl 6 docs, : I would be grateful.
Hmm, don't recall such a spot offhand. : I'm curious to know if the Perl 6 design team fully endorse a change from the : Perl 5 "the (single) implementation *is* the specification" model to a : "multiple implementations are good, m'kay, but from a single (detailed and : precise) specification" model. I think the design team would probably agree with me that you've set up a bit of a false dichotomy there. Either of those extremes is basically unworkable for what we want to do. We've found from Perl 5 that the single implementation strategy has its limits. But we also recognize that the Perl community is not (and cannot be) well-organized enough in the industrial sense to write a complete specification. (Plus I personally don't feel that anyone is smart enough to write a complete spec for the sort of evolvable thing we want. In this case Intelligent Design comes out to being the same thing as Darwinism.) So in the typical Perl community fashion, we're evolving an intermediate solution that lets us have our cake and eat it too. Pugs is becoming our reference implementation, and our hope is that the test suite we're evolving essentially becomes the design spec. On the other hand, Pugs is by design not going to be "the" production version, because the Pugs project is optimized for fun, and any pumpking will tell you that maintaining a production version is not always fun. So we know that there will multiple implementations. We fondly hope that Parrot will be the first among equals, but we're not putting all our eggs in one basket. Likewise Parrot is targeting Perl as its "first" language, but if you look at recent history you'd think they were mainly targeting TCL. And that's fine by us, both officially and unofficially. In short, we know exactly what we're not doing, :-) Larry
