Re: Ensuring forward compatibility

[Theo]

A lot of this discussion is just passed my level of understanding, so forgive me if this is inappropriate. It almost sounds like we're approaching a "Y2K" kind of issue. Even if Perl 6 won't be released for a few years yet (I don't know *what* the real schedule is) when it is released, unprepared perl 5 code will manage to find itself submitted to a Perl 6 interpreter. You can count on it! In the above discussion, it doesn’t sound like Perl 6 will magically know when it is getting perl 5. Don't programmers have an obligation to "do the right thing" now to avoid problems in the future?

Perhaps, though, only trivial code will be affected because all serious code uses packages. Is that's the case, the problems of transition will be trivial.

[simonm]

... unprepared perl 5 code will manage to find itself submitted to a Perl 6 interpreter. You can count on it! In the above discussion, it doesn’t sound like Perl 6 will magically know when it is getting perl 5. Don't programmers have an obligation to "do the right thing" now to avoid problems in the future?

The problem is that the Perl 6 team knows about this issue and is working to address it, but hasn't decided exactly how to do so. Given that we don't yet know what "the right thing" is, calls to start doing something about it seem premature.

[tye]

Thank you. I think that sums up the situation very well.