"Tolkin, Steve" wrote: > I think the language design shows > too much influence of "Evil Damian".
<Evil laugh> Dude, you're creeping me out. The way I see it is this: Perl 5 is cool in that it hides a lot of the details under the hood, and has a rich set of DWIM capabilities. But, really, it doesn't have the capacities of some of the languages developed almost 2 decades ago, specifically Ada. I'd like to be able to declare an overloaded subroutine called Iterate, have different versions of Iterate for each TYPE of variable I want to Iterate upon, and then just call Iterate(@arr) or Iterate(%hash). And OO perl was kind of a cool idea, but when you get into the nitty gritty of it, there are some things that make you go, "Ouch!" The @ISA array was a nice idea, but when you start using SUPER:: you see serious limitations. DESTROY is another one. And again, you need one of Evil Damian's perl packages if you want a multiple methods of the same name to be called determined by the TYPE of the two objects it is called upon. So, the biggest thing I see missing in perl 5 is the concept of TYPES. Ada has types and has a rich support for overloading and even multi-methods if I remember correctly. (the next biggest thing missing in perl 5 is really good OO) The problem with Ada is that EVERYTHING is typed. You can't even go to the bathroom without declaring a variable of type 'Urinal'. If Perl 6 can add the concepts of TYPES but still be able to Do What I Mean when the user doesn't declare a type, then everything should work out fine. I haven't combed the Apocalypses, but what I get from a quick scan here and there is that perl 6 will still have a simple, DWIM interface when all you want to do is print "hello world", but when you're ready to go to Overloaded Subroutines and MultiMethods, it'll be built into the language as well. Greg _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
