Re^4: getting rid of special features

[moritz]

in reply to Re^3: getting rid of special features
in thread getting rid of costly special features

You are right mostly about that, but there are other reasons to abolish them.

They make Perl 5 harder to learn, harder to write correctly, harder to read and contribute to its reputation as a language full of cruft.

The fact that they make it harder to translate Perl 5 to other languages is at first merely another symptom of the problem. But if Perl 5 doesn't want to be tied to the C world forever, and wants to explore other environment (JVM/dalvik-only mobile phones and browsers, just to name two appealing ones), the lack of portability that those features introduce becomes a problem on its own.

[Anonymous Monk]

the lack of portability that those features introduce becomes a problem on its own.

come on now, we're talking about autoincrement here, its as trivial as it gets

[moritz]

No, we're not only talking about autoincrement, we are also talking about empty // being special-cased and so on.

[Anonymous Monk]

how is it special-cased, and how is it a problem, and a problem for translation?