Re^2: Perl 6 <-> Perl 5 bridges (was Re^2: Capturing parenthesis and grouping square brackets)

[raiph]

Perl 6 is many things. For one, it includes a language I'll call STD. STD is specifically designed to host other languages including ones I'll call Pure Perl 5 (a new Perl 5 parser) and #p5p perl (Pumpkin Perl). In your comment you explore STD but then reject everything, which means you've thrown the babies (Pure Perl 5 and #p5p perl hosted alongside Pure Perl 5) out with the bathwater.

Maybe you can reconsider the bathtub so you can at least look forward to using Pure Perl 5 (which supports $/ as input record separator, $0 as the executable name, and so on) running on android or in a browser and supporting parallel processing and so on.

So the matches are in the object named $/ (OK, so $/ meant something in Perl5, let's change that!)

If you want $/ as the input separator, use a Perl 5.

I agree with @Larry (the team who designed the Perl 6 STD language) that constraining the Perl 6 STD language to back compat with Perl 5 syntax and semantics would have been a big mistake and a big missed opportunity. The end result is still much more friendly to the average Perl 5 user than, say, lisp, haskell, or scala.

you can access them as $/[0], $/1, ... (hey, wasn't we supposed to use @ for arrays. Oh, right, this is an object, you just index it as if it was an array, but ...)

You can use @ for arrays in the STD language of Perl 6, but you don't have to:

    my $array; $array[3] = True;
    my @array; @array[3] = True;

... and there are shortcuts in the form $0, $1, $2, ... WHAT?!? Yeah, the sortcuts start with $0!

I agree this sounds particularly disturbing. In practice it doesn't trip folk up. Note that you can do this:

    say "bar" ~~ /$1=(\w)(\w)(\w)/;
    say $2;   # a

The more I know about Perl6, the more I hope it's gonna disappear almost without a trace as a failed experiment.

The community is sustainable, vibrant, and growing. The contributor base, family of languages, Rakudo compiler, Rakudo debugger, toolchain, modules, doc, and intrastructure are all maturing nicely. The team has figured out the path to speeding Rakudo up by orders of magnitude. Larry's writing a Camel equivalent. There's still $100k left of the Hague grant. Sorry, but it ain't going away. :)

Perl 6 is already attracting curious hackers that have never touched Perl 5 and will I predict begin to attract Perl 5 users next year that want to be able to write in a Perl (5ish or 6ish) on new platforms (eg android via the jvm or browsers via javascript), and/or use new capabilities (eg automatic parallelizing) and/or gain expressivity (grammars, lispish macros, etc.). You are free to ignore it but I'm confident it is here to stay and is inevitably going to help usefully address many of the long standing problems Perl 5 has.