looking forward to p6 [LWN.net]

looking forward to p6

Posted Sep 22, 2006 20:05 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)
Parent article: Perl 6? Yeah, right.

first of all, it is worth noting that perl5 has not been standing still.
since perl6 was announced in 2001, perl5 has seen bug fixes and performance
improvements go into subsequent minor verions. so if you use perl5, it is
still getting better. that said, i am excited about perl6. optional strong
typing, optional haskell-like function definitions, rules (the new
regexes), and better support for concurrency are just a start. and the best
thing is that perl6 will come out with CPAN behind it. CPAN still has no
peer. 2007 is going to be a great year for perl6.

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*NOT* looking forward to p6

Posted Sep 23, 2006 5:39 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Personally, I am not at all excited about perl6.

If perl5 resembles line noise, then perl6 is line noise at the peak of a solar flare. Just read the synopses for examples of syntax. Lots of syntax. With fine distinctions. Which no non-expert is going to remember.

IMHO, much of that stuff is at entirely the wrong level of abstraction.

I agree that there are nice features (defining new operators, named parameters, multimethods, ...), but they're going exactly the wrong ay about some of them. For instance, this

sub fun (Int $x) { ... }
f( x => 1, x => 2 ); # $x := 2

should throw an error instead. Likewise, defining an infix operator with the same name as a postfix one should be an error -- instead, perl6 will use whitespace to disambiguate them.