perlmeditation xyzzy <p><i>Happy Friday! Thought I'd share a humorous tidbit written by an anonymous contributor to a Russian internet-culture wiki, and translated by me. (all original formatting preserved)</i></p> <p>It is well possible that I am not the first person to feel this way, but I know exactly what the development of Perl 6 is striving towards as the logical and absolute successor to Perl 5</p> <p>I imagine its Dao to be approximately: <ol> <li>Any collection of symbols in any encoding is syntactically valid Perl 6 code.</li> <li>There are always an <u>infinite</u> number of <u>distinct</u> ways to do <i>it</i>.</li> <li>Any person, regardless of what language he wrote before, can instantly write in Perl 6. He may never even guess that he is writing Perl 6 code. Providing, of course, he does not forget to put <c>1;</c> at the end of modules.</li> <li><c>1;</c> can be overloaded. Spaces can be overloaded. Source filters can be overloaded with the help of regular expressions, which can also be overloaded.</li> <li>Perl 6 has a canonical implementation which is written in Perl 6 and cannot be expressed in any other language. The canonical implementation can be expressed in Perl 6 but not within a finite time. We are working on it. When we are finished, <strike>the Apocalypse</strike> Armageddon will occur (which could then also be overloaded).</li></ol> <c>1;</c></p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-741923"> <br /><c>$,=qq.\n.;print q.\/\/____\/.,q./\ \ / / \\.,q. /_/__.,q..</c><br /> Happy, sober, smart: pick two.<br /> </div></div>