On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Paul Makepeace <pa...@paulm.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 23:02, Gabor Szabo <szab...@gmail.com> wrote: >> We will have questions about usage of Perl 5 and we think there should >> be also questions >> about Perl 6. > > Should Perl 6 be called something else? > * No > * Yes, not sure what > * Yes, [____] > > Maybe a question on perceived benefits for an alternative name. > > (It's quite apparent this is a very different language at the very > least syntactically & I'm inclined to join others I've read in saying > "Yes")
That would suggest that Larry Wall is soliciting ideas for a name change, which is not the case. I would not that it is not unheard of for a language to change significantly but keep the name. If you look Fortran 2008 (just to pick an example I'm familiar with) it looks *nothing* like FORTRAN II. I'm no expert, but I believe K&R's original C language was noticeably different from C99. For amusement, below I include the same program in FORTRAN II and Fortran 90. The program uses Heron's formula for finding the area of a triangle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron's_formula): 1) FORTRAN II (note that all the indentations are significant!!!) C READ FROM CARD READER UNIT 5 READ INPUT TAPE 5, 501, IA, IB, IC 501 FORMAT (3I5) C COMPUTE AREA 799 S = FLOATF (IA + IB + IC) / 2.0 AREA = SQRT( S * (S - FLOATF(IA)) * (S - FLOATF(IB)) * + (S - FLOATF(IC))) C OUTPUT TO LINE PRINTER UNIT 6 WRITE OUTPUT TAPE 6, 601, IA, IB, IC, AREA 601 FORMAT (4H A= ,I5,5H B= ,I5,5H C= ,I5,8H AREA= ,F10.2, + 13H SQUARE UNITS) STOP END 2) Fortran 90: program heron integer :: a,b,c real :: s, area ! Read from stdin. read (*,*) a,b,c ! Compute the area. s = ( a + b + c)/2 area = sqrt( s * (s-a) * (s-b) * (s-c) ) write (*,*) a,b,c,area end program -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
