use Perl;: Perl Features of the Future
Newsfactor Network has just run an article about Perl 6 which it calls Perl Features of the Future. It's a well-researched article which includes contributions from most of the major players in the Perl 6 design team. Part 2 of the article strikes a slightly strange tone as it contains a section on the problems that the design team are having with unemployment.
From part 1:
Although the design of Perl 6 has not been finalized yet, anticipation among developers and Perl hackers is beginning to build. Damian Conway, one of the Perl 6 design team members, told NewsFactor that he is excited about several features of the new version, including simplifications to the basic syntax of Perl, better interoperability with other programming languages, a more sophisticated type system, and a new regular expression and grammar mechanism.
Torkington agreed that the new regular expression syntax is one of Perl 6's best features. "We've been living with the old regular expression syntax for 30 years, bolting on new features in increasingly awkward and ugly ways," he said. "This represents the first rethinking of regular expressions in a long time, and [it] promises to take a lot of the pain out of writing and reading patterns to parse data." In regular expressions, symbols are used to match patterns of text.
According to Torkington, the new rules greatly increase the capabilities of regular expressions, eclipsing the Perl 5 implementation of this technology . "The super-sweet part is that Perl 6's rules aren't just regular expressions," he noted. "They've grown to encompass full recursive descent parsing, so you can use the same syntax to parse source code or complex file formats as you would use to pull apart fields from a string." Whew! It may be technical, but in short, it is a Good Thing.
Friday, February 14, 2003
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