[[email protected]: Glad I am not on bootstrap]
[email protected] (Simon Cozens)
| Newsgroups | perl.bootstrap |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Ben sent me this privately, with permission to forward it. He makes a bunch of points I agree with, so this saves me time typing them out. :) Simon ----- Forwarded message from Ben Tilly <[email protected]> ----- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 22:29:56 EDT From: "Ben Tilly" <[email protected]> Subject: Glad I am not on bootstrap To: [email protected] Talk about high-volume traffic! I decided to not show up there because I did not have enough to contribute to the discussion. I still don't, nor would I have time to follow it. My one suggestion for them though. Have one list. But have that list require that titles have keywords for which sub-list it would be on. Any email to the list with a title that did not fit the format would be rejected. Then anyone with a mail-filter can get the effect of multiple lists. But anyone who wants (like Simon and Russ) could see the whole list in all its gory detail. Oh, and the idea of a pluggable front-end. That was me. I suggested it because I like Perl just how it is, but there is a real class of problems facing real people that Perl cannot addres, and it could. And that class of problems is getting a programming language in the hands of people from very different linguistic backgrounds from English. To clarify the proposal: 1. It should be possible for Perl to have multiple parsing front-ends that can be switched between. 2. There should be support for writing a simply type of module that does nothing more than alias functions and variables and provide localized documentation to make it easy to "port" Perl modules to a different language. 3. This allows distribution of support by the fact that whoever does the translation de facto becomes the point person for supporting people who use that localized version of the module. :-) As a perfectly grotesque note: this allows for significant changes in the Perl language to be acceptable in Perl 6, so long as there was a parser that could still work for Perl 5 modules. To *really* clarify the proposal. I threw that out as an idea that I called bad. I still think it is bad. I also think that it is an inevitable step that someone will take soon (ie before Perl 7), and I think that whatever community first takes it will find that the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. So if anyone else thinks it is bad, well I agree. That does not mean that it is wrong though... Cheers, Ben ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- * Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals. -- [email protected] (obscurity)