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Postings from July 2000
> From: John Porter [mailto:jdporter@min.net] > You overstate my position. I don't want context-free; I > love Perl's context-sensitive nature. But it should be > easy enough to parse that other parsers could be written > without too much trouble. As it stands now, it's IMPOSSIBLE. Or easy enough to parse to solve this problem: > From: Bennett Todd [mailto:bet@rahul.net] > If backwards compat is so broken that it makes it a bad choice to > write the first implementations of perl6 in perl5 --- more > precisely, in the dialect and style that lies in the intersection of > the two languages --- then the gap is too big to hope for much > backwards compat, much salvaging of our accumulated work from CPAN. > Lose CPAN and we're just another competitor in a very populous > field. Perl defined that field, it'd be a shame for us to step to > the back of the line. One this to consider: From my understanding, one of the things that made Perl so popular early on was the inclusion of the various conversion programs for find, sed, awk, etc. But, I'm not asking for a converter from 5-6; that would be a hellish endeavor, from what I'm hearing. If there will be substantial changes, that will break many programs on CPAN...how about a warning program? I know this will sound a little OT, but a separate program that runs through perl5 code, and warns the users about what bits may have changed/gone away in perl6? That helps those of us who aren't PerlGods to fix whatever new programs that come across, and imagine how easy it _could_ make the lives for all the module maintainers, or people who use the modules and don't have someone who maintains it? Would this be tough? Am I talking out of my hat here? It could also make it easy for those of us contemplating helping with docs (because we aren't up on our C code... :( ) > John Porter ----Woodrow