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Postings from April 2001
I don't get it.
The first and foremost duty of Perl 6 is to parse and execute Perl 6.
If it doesn't, it's not Perl 6. I will call this the Prime Directive.
I think as the first approximation the implementation of Perl 6 should
get that "simple" task right. If it doesn't, all our talk and work
has been for nothing and we have failed.
People seem to think that telling Perl 5 apart from Perl 6 is trivial.
In certain special cases, yes, such as the "module"/"class" versus
"package" distinction described by Larry, but in the general case that
is not not going to be easy, for example when the difference is
more syntatical. Some Perl 5 things will by syntax errors in Perl 6,
and vice versa.
Truly detecting Perl5ness is hard: you will have to in essence
replicate the Perl 5 parsing, and we all know the amount of hair
in that code. We really want to include such a hairball in our
new beautiful code?
Thinking about the 5->6 migration and coexistence is good and useful,
but since that doesn't advance the Prime Directive, thinking about it
*too* much now or fighting over the niggly details is somewhat wasted
effort.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
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