Eric Raymond's book-in-development ``The Art of Unix Programming'' says
this about the future of Perl:
> Perl usage has grown respectably, but the language itself has been stagnant
> for two years or more.
Bah. Looks like my Perl5-Porters summaries have been completely in vain. :)
The past two years have seen extensions to the language, its portability and
its internals. We've added full Unicode support, a new threading model that
allows fork emulation on platforms like Windows which don't support fork,
(further carrying Unix concepts everywhere we go) new syntax features such as
lexical warnings, lvalue subroutines, weak references, and other bits and
pieces. Many hundreds of lines of documentation have been written or revised.
We've had new hardware support, including another four supported platforms,
(bringing the total to, what, must be about 82 by now?) plus large file and
64-bit support. And the user base keeps growing.
I'm not sure "stagnant" is the best choice of word to describe that.
> Perl's internals are notoriously grubby; it's been understood for years that
> the language's implementation needs to be rewritten from scratch, but an
> attempt in 1999 failed and another seems presently stalled.
If that other is Perl 6, I don't think we're stalled, are we? Language design
is waiting on Larry to produce the spec, and internals design is going on
quietly but steadily. We're in the design stage. That'll probably last a while
because scripting languages and interpreters aren't easy things to design, and
are even harder to get right.
Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't you supposed
to be preventing this from happening?
Simon
--
An ASCII character walks into a bar and orders a double. "Having a bad
day?" asks the barman. "Yeah, I have a parity error," replies the ASCII
character. The barman says, "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off."
-- from Skud
