Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @02:54PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @02:54PM (#1014097)

    I like Perl, I like Python, and Raku blows them both to hell. As I said, it covers all of the territory occupied by Perl, Python, C#, and Java and most of the territory occupied by Scala and Haskell. The only place Raku isn't prepared to compete is maximum performance computing - C, C++, Fortran, ATS, (maybe) Rust. Even then, the Raku syntax for FFI is much easier to work with than XS.

    The Perl6 name was a mistake, because nearly zero Perl5 code will run unmodified in Raku. It's a different language, and both Perl and Raku would have benefitted immensely if they had the foresight to label it that way from the beginning. But Larry Wall and co knocked this one out of the park.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:07PM (8 children)

    Raku isn't compared to compete in the place Perl is most useful: arbitrary text mangling, quickly coded.

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