High-magic and low-magic?

[Cody Fendant]

Leaving aside the pros and cons of the RPerl project itself, what's the story with the use of the terms high- and low-magic Perl?

I've been coding in Perl for years and haven't heard the terms before. Is it in general use or is will_the_chill introducing and trying to popularise the term?

[boftx]

I met Will last month at an Austin PM meeting and had a rather lengthy discussion with him about RPerl. It is my impression the he has introduced those terms, and they are an attempt to differentiate between Perl operations that have direct counterparts in C++ vs. those that require additional massaging.

I agree that RPerl might be valuable for new projects that require as much speed as possible (think major web apps) but I suspect that it will be impractical in most cases to re-code existing any but the smallest existing projects. This seems to be especially true when one considers all of the popular CPAN modules that would need to be re-coded if one expects to see any significant speed boost in code that uses them. (That is not to say that many of the most popular modules would not benefit from such a make-over if RPerl lives up to its potential.)

[daxim]

I agree empathically. "If you build it, they will come", Where "it" eq the possibility of writing optimisable Perl code, "they" eq optimisable Perl code.

IMO we are better off with the efforts of RPerl (et cetera Perl11/JIT whatever), even if it's just experimental right now, even if it turns out not to be practical or workable. Just opening up the discussion and getting people to think oriented towards the future is valuable.

[kcott]

G'day Cody Fendant,

As you haven't posted any links, I'll guess you're referring to "Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler, Part 9: RPerl.org & The Low-Magic Perl Commandments". If that's not right, please indicate what is. In case you don't know how to do this, see "What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?".

In that thread, the terms high-magic, low-magic and also medium-magic are used. The usage is questioned in "Re^5: Perl 5 Optimizing Compiler, Part 9: RPerl.org & The Low-Magic Perl Commandments":

"Since "magic" has a specific meaning within perl, can I suggest you use some other term?"

In reply, will_the_chill writes:

"I appreciate your suggestion of not expanding the already-specific meaning of the term "magic" in relation to Perl. Do you have any suggestions?"

While I don't recall encountering those terms before, I couldn't say if will_the_chill introduced them. It does not appear that he's making an attempt to "popularise" them.