RE: Perl, the new generation

> On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 10:00:13PM +0100, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> > On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 01:49:30PM -0700, Edward Peschko wrote:
> > > We need to keep syntactic compatibility, which means we need
> to keep the
> > > ability for perl6 to USE PERL5.
> >
> > I think you're in violent agreement here.  This has been declared a
> > goal of Perl 6 from almost day one.
>
> Ok, fair enough, but until just a little bit ago I was hearing
> stuff different from Dan. That has been changed, apparently recently

If this is an actively pursued goal, I consider the issue dead, with one
remark: "use Perl5" or anything else that has to appear in legacy code
thereby forcing hunting and changing all perl programs will likely cause it
to reappear, unless we can find a way to default to both. On UN*X this is
symlinks (let's not reopen it, just suffice to say that /something/ needs to
prevent this requirement), and on Win32 and other systems without symlinks,
a separate executable. Since the executable is so small on both (all?)
systems, it's not much of an addition. Win32 already has
perl5.6.0(-win32-multi-thread-morestuff).exe and perl.exe. This is an old
argument, and one I don't wish to reopen, as long as /something/ along this
order can provide for a painless migration.

With that in place, let's change whatever syntax gets annoying.

p