Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 21, 2012 18:01 UTC (Mon) by theophrastus (guest, #80847)
Parent article: Perl 5.16.0 released

Is it a sacrilege (here) to inquire after the Perl known as 6?

and/or is Perl 5.x.y now a de-facto fork (and ought to be renamed, 'perlv')

As an aside, even as i've migrated mostly to python, i am grateful for most things Perl has done; inspiring things like ruby, and too specifically, allowing me to finish my graduate work in less than ten thousand years. thanks be to the many Perl developers!

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 21, 2012 18:13 UTC (Mon) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

Perl 6 is largely irrelevant for practical purposes. Its focus is experimentation without the demands of compatibility.

Perl 5 isn't a fork. It's the practical workhorse it's always been.

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 21, 2012 20:49 UTC (Mon) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

There is no fork. Perl 6 is a completely different beast with a somewhat unfortunate name.

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 22, 2012 8:31 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (4 responses)

It was originally planned for Perl 6 to be the next version of Perl - with a compatibility mode for running existing Perl code on the Parrot virtual machine - but that plan has been abandoned as too difficult.

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 22, 2012 11:05 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

that plan has been abandoned as too difficult

Really? Is that the official word, that Perl 6 really won't be compatible with Perl 5? Are there plans for automated or semi-automated Perl 5-to-6 translation tools? Without that, I believe Perl 6 is dead.

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 22, 2012 11:57 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.ponie.dev/2006/08/msg...

Translation tools would be possible, of course, but I don't know of anyone working on them at the moment. (Perl 5's syntax and semantics make such tools trickier than they would be for, say, Python or C#.)

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 22, 2012 12:29 UTC (Tue) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link]

From that email:

Lots of good came out of Ponie, just not the good things we expected. A number of very talented hackers are currently exploring multiple strategies to enable most Perl 5 code to run seamlessly along side Perl 6 in Parrot. Folks have already demonstrated a proof-of-concept Parrot VM embedded in the Perl 5 runtime. Work is underway on a Perl 5 to Perl 6 translator and the existing Perl 6 compiler on Parrot is the proof of concept for a similar implementation of a "regularized" Perl 5. At this point, it wouldn't be reasonable to bless any one right way forward but each of these techniques (and possibly others) could play a part in whatever "5 on 6" scheme we end up with. No matter what happens, we're committed to making your Perl 5 code play well with new Perl 6 code.

The Perl 6 FAQ still says that there will be a translator and a compability mode.

Perl 5.16.0 released

Posted May 22, 2012 13:59 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

No, that's certainly not in any way official or final. Interop is difficult and the Perl 6 implementors are very understaffed. It's just the usual "noone has gotten around to it".