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Postings from May 2003
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 05:13:18PM +0100, Orton, Yves wrote: > > References to these things do not appear natural or relevant to me, even > > though I understand them, and I feel this reflects a growing number of > > Perl users. We should probably listen to that and purge Perl of Unixisms > > for the sake of Unixisms where possible. > > Absolutely not. And I'm an almost pure Win32 user. Systematically excising > *nix references > from the Perl documentation would IMO verge on criminal recklessnes. Let me > repeat that > im a win32 user almost solely and I still feel this way. I think people are getting the wrong idea. "purge Perl of Unixisms for the sake of Unixisms" != "Systematically excising Unix references". Unixisms will be left in where they help teach Perl or explain a particularly Unixy feature that can't be explained out of context. For example, some of the odd behaviors of chdir() can't be explained without getting into Bornue Shell behavior. Of course, perlfunc/chdir *doesn't* currently mention shell... Which is why I think Grand Talk about providing Flavor and Historical Context is all interesting and good, but the existing snippets don't really accomplish that because its spotty and inconsistent. Rather than trying to explain what this elephant looks like, I'll just show you with what I've done to perlsyn: http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97711.html http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97712.html Folks seem to be leaping to conclusions here and dealing with abstracts, I'd like to move the discussion over to direct comments on those two patches. Look at what's been changed and comment on why you'd have left it in the docs and how it helps teach Perl (and yes, teaching Perl includes history and rationale). I'm interested in concrete reasons here. Its important to note that I altered less than 10 points in perlsyn. Also, consider it in the context of consolidating the external references as a first move towards a proper discussion of Perl's relationship to other languages. I don't think I lost any information, just moved it. In this context, perltrap is a holding pen. -- WOOHOO! I'm going to Disneyland! http://www.goats.com/archive/980805.html