Re:Perl 6 Optimism
by raiph on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @11:54AM
(#16215009)
> Perl 5 and 6 are still tied together as if they are the same language
P5 and P6 have been explicitly different languages since day one[1]. As Larry Wall said, "We had to make almost everything [in Perl 5] ... backward compatible [with previous Perls] ... But now it’s the first chance to [break bug-for-bug syntactic and semantic compatibility] and ... I think we should [take the chance]."
> There’s no compatibility between the two.
None?
With an appropriately compiled perl 5 binary installed one can install regular Perl 5 modules from CPAN and use them as if they were Perl 6 modules:
use Some:Perl5::Module:from<Perl5> ;
How is this not compatible?
> You can’t write a library that works in both versions
Even the large complex Perl 5 package Catalyst works in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 per the above.
> so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful
Per the above, the majority of CPAN just works 100% correctly out of the box.
> If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago.
P6ers thought about backward compatibility with Perl 5 from day one[1].
P5 and P6 have been explicitly different languages since day one[1]. As Larry Wall said, "We had to make almost everything [in Perl 5] ... backward compatible [with previous Perls] ... But now it’s the first chance to [break bug-for-bug syntactic and semantic compatibility] and ... I think we should [take the chance]."
> There’s no compatibility between the two.
None?
With an appropriately compiled perl 5 binary installed one can install regular Perl 5 modules from CPAN and use them as if they were Perl 6 modules:
How is this not compatible?> You can’t write a library that works in both versions
Even the large complex Perl 5 package Catalyst works in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 per the above.
> so you lose CPAN and the thousands of packages that make Perl so powerful
Per the above, the majority of CPAN just works 100% correctly out of the box.
> If Perl 6 wanted backwards compatibility, they needed to have thought about it a long time ago.
P6ers thought about backward compatibility with Perl 5 from day one[1].
[1] https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/