"Bryan C. Warnock" wrote:
>
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, David L. Nicol wrote:
> > There will Be No Perl7
>
> Of course not. Odd numbers are the development releases. The next
> Perl after 6 will be 8.
So maybe the reference implementation should be written in perl 4. Did
perl 4 have references? Doing all codrefs in terms of eval'ing strings
would be a PITA.
> Seriously, while a worthwhile goal, this is rather short-sighted.
> The industry and the world will continue to change in spite (or
> because!) of our efforts here. We can make it easier for the users to
> adapt, but Perl will need to continue to evolve, as well.
So we write in full access to internals, and capable macro and
redefining languages, making perl6 a framework you can build anything
into even easier than perl5 is a framework you can build anything in to.
Perl5 was the experimentation period for threading and OO syntaces, now
we've played with them for a while, we can write in programmatic access
to on-the-fly parser modification and then the language becomes customary.
Further releases of the standard would be modifications to the parser rules
or the clarification engine, rather than rewrites.
Language = Framework + Parser-rules + Clarification-engine
Parser-rules can be rewritten with certain reserved macros, allowing
use intercal2000;
to cause the remainder of the program to be interpreted as intercal, for
instance,
And if the Clarification-engine is aware of everything that is not
explicitly hidden from it, or if it can be pulled out and completely
replaced, that not only makes translating into different languages
a real breeze, it allows subroutines to be genuinely on the same footing
as builtins, instead of just seeming that way.
--
David Nicol 816.235.1187 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Does despair.com sell a discordian calendar?
