Front page | perl.bootstrap |
Postings from July 2000
2000-07-20-14:00:02 John Porter: > Bennett Todd: > >Is the language perl5 really that deeply flawed? > > IMHO, yes it is. Could you offer specifics? The only specific thing that I think seriously sucks about perl5 is that it cannot be rigged to do exceptions well and thoroughly, with a simple module; the default behavior of ignoring all errors unless they're explicitly checked for lives on, Fatal.pm notwithstanding. But fixing that would require only subtle internal changes; make it possible to override print, overhaul the O-O I/O system so it's better organized, tweak a few things that just don't work, then define helper lists to make it easy to "use Fatal :IO", or "use Fatal :core", or "use Fatal :all", or whatever. > 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? I didn't know what. 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, and so never anything that'd provide a disincentive for writing perl6 in perl5. If you want to really junk all of Perl, all of CPAN, the whole kit and caboodle and start from scratch, by all means do, but I sincerely hope that that isn't the charter of the perl6 project. > Not only do we have a language that "sucks" in some respects, > but we're too bullheaded to fix what we can when we get the > opportunity. What sucks, that requires completely breaking any hope of backwards compatibility to fix? -Bennett