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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 29 2020, @08:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the out-with-the-old,-in-with-the-new dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

This morning at The Perl Conference in the Cloud, Sawyer X announced that Perl has a new plan moving forward. Work on Perl 7 is already underway, but it's not going to be a huge change in code or syntax. It's Perl 5 with modern defaults and it sets the stage for bigger changes later. My latest book Preparing for Perl 7 goes into much more detail.

Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. You won't have to enable most of the things you are already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and what we can do in the future.

Remember, Perl was the "Do what I mean" language where the defaults were probably what you wanted to do. In Perl 4 and the early days of Perl 5, that was easy. But, it's been a couple of decades and the world is more complicated now. We kept adding pragmas, but with Perl's commitment to backward compatibility, we can't change the default settings. Now we're back to the old days of C where we have to include lots of boilerplate before we start doing something:
[...]
This is slightly better with v5.12 and later because we get strict for free by using setting a minimum version:
[...]
Perl 7 is a chance to make some of these the default even without specifying the version. Perl 5 still has Perl 5's extreme backward compatibility behavior, but Perl 7 gets modern practice with minimal historical baggage.

Source: https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @12:32AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @12:32AM (#1014319)

    ?? Perl has the amazing and significant advantage of much faster startup and lower overhead than Raku, and the even more significant advantage that it's rare to find a *Nix installation without it. And those are completely valid reasons to use Perl over Raku for a task.

    But did you really think Larry Wall was going to try to make a language in the Perl family and kick text wrangling to the curb? That would be like having Guy Fieri and Mario Batali announce that they were going to collaborate on a new nail salon. Raku is excellent for text wrangling.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 30 2020, @12:51AM (6 children)

    I've used Perl6. Built an IRC bot in it a year or three ago here on our IRC server. It sucks all of the cocks for text wrangling compared to Perl5. It's not quite as ass licking as Python for the job but it's close.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.