Re:Larry Wall's Perl 6 Release Talk [video]
by codeflo on Saturday November 14, 2015 @08:31AM
(#10565593)
Thanks for the clarification. So what does it mean to release "a language"? Is there a specification in addition to the test suite? Is the specification frozen from that point on? Or will it change, but only in backwards compatible ways?
Re:Larry Wall's Perl 6 Release Talk [video]
by perlgeek on Saturday November 14, 2015 @08:45AM
(#10565633)
The test suite is the actual specification; for the language release, it will be cleaned up of things that aren't yet ironed out.
The design documents at http://design.perl6.org/ are companion documents to the test suite, but where the two are in conflict, the test suite is authoritative.
As for changes: backward incompatible changes will result in a new language version.
That said, Rakudo of today is more usable than Rakudo of days gone by, though there are still issues (my personal pet peeve: parsing speed; hopefully, automatic precompilation will land in the not-too-distant future, which, would mitigate the problem).