Richard Hainsworth writes: > When does the specification of perl6 come to an end?
At a guess: when it's implemented. Many of the recent changes have been made by Larry in response to his trying to write the grammer, and encountering problems. > Perhaps there could be a perl6.0 specification, with further changes > (syntactic sugar, new operators, renaming operators, etc) being > assigned/incorporated into a perl6.1 specification, etc. There would be no point in freezing a specification that isn't implementable. If we had labelled the spec as it was a year ago as "Perl 6.0" and all subsequent changes as being part of "Perl 6.1" that wouldn't've made any practical difference: it would be Perl 6.1 that everybody was trying to implement! Or to put it another way, feel free to assign the label "Perl 5.93714" to a snapshot of the current spec, the state that it is in right now. Then we can all agree that Perl 5.93714 will never change. But I doubt it will help. > While perl6 remains unstable in its specification (or is perceived to > be that way) and is looking (from outside a select group?) like a > unending road, wont this act as a deterrent to those who want to help > hack it into existence, usefulness and stability? If it's any comfort the road doesn't look anywhere near as unending as it used to be! Many recent changes have been consolidatory, or relatively minor syntax tweaks -- not deep changes to the core of the language. Larry writing the grammar is a tangiable task which should have a natural end, hopefully getting us to a relatively stable point where the spec is at least consistent and implementable. There are still some 'hey wouldn't it be great if ...' threads on this list, proposing brand new features, but nowhere near as many as there used to be. And at least some of us are trying to discourage such things, hoping to deflect them away from taking Larry's time away from getting finished synthesizing what we already have -- especially in the case of things which could easily be provided by a module. Smylers
