http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=137836


in reply to (ichimunki) Re: Thoughts on Perl6 - Love it? Hate it?
in thread Thoughts on Perl6 - Love it? Hate it?

I would prefer that references kept -> and. would get used for methods and properties and stuff. But I'll live.

Ageed.

But I doubt it will end up feeling optional after a few more C programmers are converted.

Converts from C already have to have for(;;) beaten out of them. However, IMHO the code that really matters is what everyone more or less has to use; in the Perl world, that equates to CPAN. Therefor I rest soundly at night (so long as I don't have other worries).

I use _ a lot in variable and sub names, but I tend to do most my concatenating using interpolated strings anyway.

Remember that the new concatenation operator will in effect be "space underscore space". Underscores embedded into identifiers don't get mistaken for concatenations.

What I'd really prefer is a way for me to do something like $name = sub{ return 'My Name' }; print "$name\n"; without having $name return a darned coderef value rather than the results of $name->().

You can already do something akin to this using overloading. It is extra code, but you can neatly package it away. (See "Falsify" scalar strings for a quick overview of how to use overloading for sorcery of this kind.)

And as far as the bytecode is concerned, rest safe in the knowledge that every single modern interpreted language uses bytecode compilation in some way. As already mentioned by tilly++, but maybe not emphasized strongly enough, the difference between the Java and Perl bytecode is that Perl5's bytecode is very high-level - in fact, for a number of builtins, a call to them results in a single VM instruction. Java's VM on the other hand is very low-level and tries to mimic real hardware. That is the reason why Perl is fast and Java is slow. That's not going to change. Perl 6 is just bigger and better than Perl 5 in that respect. That's all there is to Parrot - more of the same, with some extra spice and lots of chilly.


Maybe in contrast to my posts here so far, I don't think I'll enjoy Perl 6 as much as Perl 5 for a while to come. Perl 6 will be new, unfamiliar. I'm sort of an old dog in Perl 5, not nearly as much as others but I consider myself fluent in it and have no trouble finding my way around things and pronouncing ideas such that I can express them in a Perl5ish, idiomatic fashion. It will take everyone a while to achieve this level of familiarity in Perl 6. What I'm really looking forward to is using Perl 6, after having already used it for a year.