At 10:53 AM 8/25/00 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Dan wrote:
> >At 09:12 AM 8/25/00 -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
> >> As you say, 200 lines isn't much. But combine that with the IPC, the
> >>environment, the system, etc it all adds up.
> >
> >Not to much, though. We've been down this road for perl 5. You'd be
> >surprised at how little code gets removed if you yank most of the
>functions
> >under discussion. (They're generally trivial wrappers around library
>calls,
> >with very little code involved)
>
>so is all this concern about the size of perl due to the hope
>of making perl "embeddable"? with 128 meg of ram and
>a 40 gig drive, I'll assume its not due to system limitations.
Embeddability is one worry, though not necessarily a primary one. Behind
the scenes modularity makes things easier to deal with
conceptually--there's a limit to what'll fit in my brain. It can aid in
portability and make code cleaner in some ways, since platform-specific
code can be isolated more easily. (And yes, I know, you can do it now)
System limits are still an issue--loading 2M worth of interpreter still
takes twice as long, more or less, as loading in 1M of interpreter code,
and the fewer external symbol fixups you need to do in the general case the
faster the load time.
Having said that...
Unless Larry decrees otherwise, nothing that's built-in and guaranteed now
will be missing or need a "use thingie;" in perl 6. Moreover, if things are
stripped out into separate libraries and automagically loaded in, it won't
be done unless there's a compelling reason, and "conceptual coolness" just
doesn't cut it as a reason.
There are good reasons. It may make things easier to upgrade. It may make
perl faster, either to run or to start. It may make perl smaller, either in
on-disk or in-memory footprint. It may make the optimizer better (fewer
things to think about means fewer cases to think about) and thus ultimately
speed up a program. It may make sense from a modularity standpoint when
targeting perl at special-purpose gadgets.
Or, more succinctly, we're not going to screw with perl without a *darned*
good reason.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
