note Bukowski I was at the london.pm talks (both Damians 'Life the Universe and Everything' and the Perl6 talk) and as a Perl 'user' as opposed to anything else I was extremely happy to find that not only could I understand the talk (it was extremely well pitched) it has certainly removed any fears I had about Perl6<P> I don't have the wherewithal to understand everything Larry says in the Apocalypses - Damians talk (a marathon 3 hours) brought home just how much SENSE Perl6 makes!<P> Anyone using Perl either loves <or I presume hates ;)> its quirks, but there are some issues that really needed addressing - from simple things like sigil useage to the, lets face it, unwieldy regex syntax.<P> I have been more concerned about the regex re-write than anything else, because thats WHY I USE PERL! So they're not really regex anymore but 'rules' and one thing thats vastly improved is whitespace handling. They're simply much more powerful now.<P> I am a perl novice, but my appetite has been wetted for Perl6 - I really cannot wait, so much so that I spent the day after the talks reading up on Parrot.<P> The quote for me that summed it up was Damian saying "You trusted Larry with Perl5 and it all worked out, now trust him with Perl6".<P> Perl has the *best* developer community of any language, and Perl6 will have its nay-sayers, but for an average user I can see how Perl6 is going to make my life a whole lot easier and THATS THE POINT!<P> If you've never heard Damian speak, and he's near you - go see him. He's endlessly entertaining, extremely insightful and a wonderful ambassador for Perl.<P> Yeah I know I am starting to sound evangelical, but I loved what I saw. The people moaning about the changes in Perl seem to be the ones who really just don't want to take a step forward. Humanity never got anywhere by sitting around doing nothing... <P> Bukowski - aka Dan (dcs@black.hole-in-the.net)<br> "Coffee for the mind, Pizza for the body, Sushi for the soul" -Userfriendly 194065 194065