On Tue, Aug 01, 2000 at 02:31:15AM -0400, Sam Tregar wrote:
> Note that we don't have to take that "chance," but I don't think we should
> turn it down lightly. I suppose a reasonable question is: can we achieve
> our goals without a rewrite? Can we succeed in integrating threading and
> Unicode where the Perl5 developers have failed, without rewriting the
> internals? I'm not qualified to say no, but I'd like to hear compelling
> arguments before I'd believe a yes!
I don't think I'm qualified to say no, but if I was, I'd say no. Too much
in perl 5 has been bolted on as afterthoughts. Things like threading really
need to be built in from the beginning. Unicode is currently a devious hack
which is steadily working, but to get it *right* would mean ripping out
reasonably big chunks of code. And there isn't very much room to maneuver
in the internals right now.
It's like a delicately balanced stack of cards: changes are very rarely
atomic, and usually end up with you burbling around in toke.c (this is not
fun) or in the macro hell that is deep SV and GV manipulation. If you want a
fun afternoon, look at how UTF8 stashes are implemented. And then there's the
regular expression engine.
Time to lay this to rest, I think.
--
I think... I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.
-- Escher
