Here I was, just thinking about how bored I was: "Nothing's going on... there's nothing interesting to read. There hasn't even been an apocalypse or exegesis in awhile", I thought.
Then, lo and behold, I check Perl.com, and Exegesis 5 is out! Whoopie!
Previous Apocalypses took an evolutionary approach to changing Perl's general syntax, data structures, control mechanisms, and operators. New features were added, old features removed, existing features were enhanced, extended, and simplified. But the changes described were remedial, not radical.
Larry could have taken the same approach with regular expressions. He could have tweaked some of the syntax, added new (?...) constructs, cleaned up the rougher edges, and moved on.
Fortunately, however, he's taking a much broader view of Perl's future than that.
As Piers Cawley has so eloquently misquoted: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that any language in possession of a rich syntax must be in want of a rewrite." Perl regexes are such a language. And Apocalypse 5 is precisely that rewrite.
Oh my gosh! I just finished reading it, and I can't get over how fantastic it is! I feel like I need a cigarette! The Apocalypse was super-long, and while I got the idea of all the changes, the Apocalypse didn't have the impact that Damian's Exegesis just had on me.
Man this is awesome.
Hopefully some readers at LtU will be able to enlighten me on how Perl 6's text processing compares to other languages which specialize in text processing, such as Icon and SNOBOL.
Friday, August 23, 2002
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