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Synopsis 3 is out

by Limbic~Region (Chancellor)
on Mar 19, 2004 at 16:23 UTC ( [id://338040]=perlnews: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Synopsis 3.

Cheers - L~R

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Re: Synopsis 3 is out
by kvale (Monsignor) on Mar 19, 2004 at 17:39 UTC
    I think that the major operator reshuffling will be one of the hardest aspects of Perl6 for me to get used to. Coming from a C background, many of the operators will no longer DWIM.

    One thing I am confused about is the need for context sensitivity (+,~?). I like Perl5 taking its best guess as to what I want; it is almost always correct, and the resulting code is cleaner than the new stuff.

    -Mark

      Perl 6 will also guess, and usually guess right. The context operators are mostly to communicate to the reader of the code, and to force a particular interpretation when Perl wouldn't guess right.
      One thing I am confused about is the need for context sensitivity (+,~?). I like Perl5 taking its best guess as to what I want; it is almost always correct, and the resulting code is cleaner than the new stuff.

      See Can you spot the problem? for one place where context sensitivity would help.

Re: Synopsis 3 is out
by muba (Priest) on Mar 19, 2004 at 18:36 UTC
    What's their point? They change '->' into '.' to be more compatible with other programming languages, but then they also change '? :' into '?? ::'. What k... what a... I don't even know what to wonder.
      You shouldn't try to intuit the rationale for these things from the synopsis. Compatibility with other programming languages is only one of many considerations that go into these decisions. In the case of ?: we felt the Huffman coding of it was too short, and we wanted individual ? and : for other purposes. Be thankful we do think about compatibility with other languages, or we wouldn't have made the new operator resemble the C operator at all. As it is, we get the nice side benefit that ??:: now looks like all the other double-char short-circuit operators. And we can now use the single character versions for more important things.

        A large market for Perl 6 *is* existing Perl 5 users. The quesion is this. If you have to learn a whole lot of new operators is it easier to learn a new language or to learn perl 6?

        I like javascript as a language limited though that may be. I hate actually working with it because, like many hacks, I have in the past had to make two almost similar languages (JScript and Javascript/Live Script) work. The major problem is that they are just similar enough to trick you.

        Perl 6 will face this hurdle. There is a lot of perl 5 code and there are a lot of perl 5 coders out there. When/if perl 6 arrives there will be concurrent perl5 and perl6 code which is rather similar to the J(ava)script issue. Sure you can say use perl5 in perl6 but this is very similar to saying I will only code JS for IE.

        Are there any examples of languages that have rather radically changed the API in the past? By radical change I mean breaking almost every existing progam more complex then hello world.

        cheers

        tachyon

        You say 'we'. Does that mean that you're involved with Perl developement?

        Anyhow, what odes Huffman coding mean?

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