Larry Wall's recent State of the Onion address concerned Perl 6 and the concept of being prepared to do "whatever" in the context of the next version of the language. Government Computer News 1..*. "Actually, "whatever" is such an important concept that we built it into Perl 6. This is read, 'from one to whatever'," Wall said. He extended the discussion of the topic from here: You might ask why we can't just say "from one to infinity." The problem is that not all operators operate on numbers: Not all operators are ranges. Here's the sibling argument operator, which repeats the same words an arbitrary number of times: ("Yes!","No!") xx* Perl has always been about letting you care about the things you want to care about, while not caring about the things you don't want to care about, or that maybe you're not quite ready to care about yet. That's how Perl achieves both its accessibility and its power. We've just baked more of that "who cares?" philosophy into Perl 6. When it comes to the delivery date, Wall is equally "whatever" about that, as he and the Perl community have been, historically: Now, anyone who has been following along at home knows that we never, ever promise a delivery date for Perl 6. Nevertheless, I can point out that many of us hope to have most of a Perl 6 parser written in Perl 6 by this Christmas. The only big question is which VM it will compile down to first. There's a bit of a friendly race between the different implementations, but that's healthy, since they're all aiming to support the same language. Or as Wall put it in his closing slide, relating that to the opening mnemonic for remembering "the old Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
Whatever, Perl 6 Is On The Way
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