Optional typing systems are a nice idea, but I doubt
they will be used much. For instance if you properly
declare things in Common Lisp, it is supposed to be as
fast as C. But most people don't do that, and those who
do occasionally get good foot-shootage out of it. Besides
which, the performance gains will probably not really
materialize for a couple of iterations.
The global variables were ridiculous. The only one
I would miss is $!. I am used to typing that...
Changing the arrow syntax brings Perl in line with
the syntax used by virtually all other languages. And
backwards compatibility is not an issue since Perl 5
code will run through the translator which supports the
old syntax.
The fallback goes the other way. You are making a
method lookup and it falls back to a hash lookup when
no such method is found.
Again you have what Damian said exactly backwards.
Perl will go from methods not saying what you get but
everything else saying what you will get to having
nothing say what you will get. So I suspect that if
something like @object.method() is on the
horizon it will be something like
map {$_->method()} @object is today...
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
