An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 19, 2015 22:43 UTC (Sun) by raiph (guest, #89283)
In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by Wol
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

> store the mantissa in the data definition, not the data itself.
> you have to be wary of multiplying [such] fields

Gotchya.

Iirc pick doesn't have (much of) a type system and you're describing the kind of problem that type systems address.

I don't see a parallel with anything Perl 6 specific atm.

Thanks for following up. :)

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 20, 2015 14:34 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Pick have a type system? You must be joking!!!

imho that is both a great strength, and a massive weakness. Everything is a string. Works great (it really does). But the fact that all of your definitions are DEscriptive, rather than PREscriptive, *can* (not *is*) be a nightmare when you really really want to be certain something is, say, a number.

But on the other hand, it does make it easy to store things like "dead" or "unknown" in an age field :-)

Cheers,
Wol