On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 06:06:14PM +0100, James Fuller wrote: > there seems to be a dearth of xml 'ness' in Perl 6 design ... perhaps > before Perl 6 is fully baked its time to review what could live in the > core versus an external module. > > thoughts?
If I remember the plan correctly, it's roughly that the core consists only of the mechanisms for getting and installing other extension modules - anything that doesn't need to be in the core, isn't. This slim core intentionally won't be useful for that much, other than the basis for building larger Perl 6 distributions aimed at broad types of tasks. The idea being that an ISP would install the "web serving" distribution, which would be bundled with the sorts of modules appropriate for that task, but not burned with the sorts of modules useful for bioinformatics. The aim is to avoid the problem that Perl 5 finds itself in, where things once added to the core can never be removed, and 15 years later you find that there are several generations of "this is current" modules in the distribution that are a maintenance burden. Usually a burden that falls on volunteers. Nicholas Clark
