On Nov 29, 2007 6:40 AM, James Fuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I would argue that XML is slightly evolved 'text' and I would like to > see my fav programming language treat it as a first class citizen > internally.
I think you are falling into a classic builtin trap. The idea is that when you install perl, you install perl core + some modules packed with the install. We would like to discourage installing perl core without any modules. But that point has been made many times already. I think you're addressing something more of a "feel" issue. You're saying that XML types should have the same first-class status as strings or integers, and not some awkward blessed reference business or anything. Fortunately, Perl 6 is working pretty hard to make sure you can make data types feel builtin. In fact, this allows us to implement many core data types as modules until we add compiler support, with no kludges for the users. XML will be the same, a module. If we find that somebody writes a truly excellent XML module that becomes widely used and would benefit from having support in the compiler, it will be added to the compiler[1]. But basically the decision comes from a philosophy that core is nothing special; there need not be a difference between a core data type and one defined in a module. With a modular enough compiler, there need not even be a difference in terms of what code is generated. Please, you, everyone, forget about the word "core". It is an implementation detail. Luke
