Perl 6 renamed to Raku
Perl 6 renamed to Raku
Posted Oct 16, 2019 14:33 UTC (Wed) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)In reply to: Perl 6 renamed to Raku by geuder
Parent article: Perl 6 renamed to Raku
Not really. Eg, Perl 5 uses "funny characters" partly in a way similar to articles in natural languages, with @ denoting a plural and $ a singular. In practice, this means that @a is an array, $a[0] is the first element of this array, @a[0 .. 4] is a slice composed of the first five elements and $a[0 .. 4] is a weird way to refer to $a[1] (in scalar context, the range operator, .., evaluates to 0[*] or 1 depending on whether the first or the second argument has a value which is regarded as true). TLFKAP6 uses @ and $ as namespace separators for arrays and scalars, with @a being an array and @a[0] being the first element of it. This means someone has to go through the code and change an open-ended number of $ to @ depending on what it's supposed to be and each of these changes has to be tested somehow in order to determine if the code still works. This is obviously doable but technically pointless for working code and possibly a lot of work.
[*] It really returns an undefined value which will be autoconverted to 0 or an empty string if either a number or a string was called for (possibly emitting a warning in some subset of the possible use cases of this if this has been enabled).