On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:41 AM, yary <not....@gmail.com> wrote: > Perl is being actively developed for the Parrot VM. LLVM is another > interesting option and if someone or some group would like to take it > on, it would be a welcome alternate implementation. > > What parts in particular of Cobra and ioke look useful to you? Looking > at Cobra's intro slide- > > * Cobra is a new language (sub 1.0) > Not sure if Perl6 qualifies as a new language. It's built off of an > old language, and is backwards compatible with it. And, perl5 is > adopting pieces of perl6. On the other hand there's enough in Perl6 > that's new it's easy to make the case that it is a new case.
Yes, Perl 6 does - it is not backwards compatible with Perl 5. It's based very heavily on it, but I think it does qualify as 'new' to most purposes. New, but at least partially familiar. I don't see anything in either language's summary that Perl 6 can't already do or which couldn't be implemented with it. One thing you have to keep in mind is that when we have the full-blown macro and introspection systems available in a Perl 6 implementation, a great deal of power to add new language features is then in our hands. At that point we could quite probably manage syntax-level support for unit tests, etc. - although I've never been entirely convinced about the absolute necessity of such things. We do have pre- and post-conditions, in PRE and POST blocks - see Synopsis 4 under 'closure traits'. Signature-level where blocks help with DBC-style programming as well. Okay so we don't run on JVM or .NET right now, but there are people who've come to #perl6 and expressed an interest in doing it. Not an easy project, but maybe some amazing people will do it one day.
