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Postings from July 2000
Bennett Todd wrote: > > Could you offer specifics? Oh, I *could*... :-) > > I know to most folks backward compatibility is essential, but IMHO > > the enslavement to it is what will cause Perl to lose out to other > > languages like Python. > > Has Python indulged in non-backwards compat more than Perl? No; but it is considerably more recent, and was also more carefully designed from the outset. > Perl has done some, especially around the perl4->perl5 > change, and I'd expect some more (equally careful and minor) in the > future. But never anything so violent and comprehensive as to > require throwing away any hope of reasonable compatibility with all > the code that's already been written, Well, I'm not necessarily advocating that strong a break. The resemblance could be close enough that converting a perl5 program to a perl6 program could be a trivial, or automatable, task. But I believe that this is a good opportunity for things that are broken to get fixed -- and if bw-compat is lost sometimes, so be it. > What sucks, that requires completely breaking any hope of backwards > compatibility to fix? First and foremost, the proverb that "nothing can parse Perl except perl" must be rendered null and void. This, I presume, would entail changes to the grammar that would likely have the effect of breaking bw-compat. But if I turn out to be wrong on that point, so much the better. -- John Porter Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht.