Re: perl 6 requirements

On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 12:17:58PM +0100, Hildo Biersma wrote:
> In issue 3.2.1 (localtime), note that the month starting at 0 is very
> useful for arrays - which is of the course the reason it is done this
> way.  I am not convinced going to an index of 1 is the right approach. 
> It might be more useful if the core came with a useful, minimalistic but
> inheritable, Date object.

Hmm.  Do you mean "core" as in "part of the perl binary" or as in
"comes with the standard perl distribution"?  I always think of "the
core" as the former.  Given that definition for "core" I don't think
we need Date objects as part of the core but I *do* think that we
should have some thin interfaces (OO and procedural) that provide
arrays that start from 1, etc. as part of the perl distribution.

> In issue 3.5.1 (data types), I would strongly propose that any strong
> data typing of perl is done sanely: using the C/C++ approach of
> 'natural' data sizes.
> This means 'int' means 'whatever your architecture usefully supports as
> an int'.

Keep in mind that there are insane people like myself who don't care how
many bits a numeric scalar is as long as it can hold whatever number I
put in it.  :-)  I'd like to see Perl have smart type promotion (and
demotion) built-in.  (i.e. char <-> int <-> long <-> arbitrary as
needed)

> - (pipedream) making closures proper first-level objects that
>   can be serialized/dumped and later restored.

Remember ... Perl 6 is still a pipedream  ;-)

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
[email protected]