[rochester-pm-list] www.perl.com: Report on the Perl 6 Announcement (fwd)

[Brian Mathis]

For anyone interested in what's happenning with Perl 6..

-- 
Brian Mathis
Direct Edge
http://www.directedge.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 23:45:36 -0700
From: www.perl.com update <onperl at lists.oreillynet.com>
To: perl-update at pepper.oreillynet.com
Subject: www.perl.com: Report on the Perl 6 Announcement
Resent-Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 17:15:48 -0700
Resent-From: perl-update at lists.oreillynet.com

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Hello, perl.com subscribers.

The big, big news this week:  The Perl 6 project has begun; Larry
announced it last Wednesday at the Perl Conference.

Here's a very short summary of the answers to the frequently asked 
questions:

* Perl 6 will be a complete rewrite from scratch.  One of the 
  primary goals is to render the Perl internals more accessible 
  and less convoluted.  Larry specifically mentioned scrapping 
  the XS extension module system in favor of something better.  
  Nobody knows yet just what the new internals or the XS 
  replacement will be like.

* The rewrite will allow Perl to correct a number of old 
  deficiencies of Perl 5.  For example, signal handling can be made 
  safe and robust.  The threading and Unicode projects have run into 
  snarls because Perl 5 was not designed with threading or Unicode 
  in mind, and these major subsystems had to be bolted on as well as 
  they could be.  Perl 6 will be designed from the start with full 
  support for threading and Unicode.

* This is also an opportunity to break backward compatibility and 
  get rid of some of Perl's less endearing features.  (Consider the
  notorious $* variable, for example.)  An upward migration path 
  from Perl 5 will be preserved: At the very least, there will be a 
  program that will translate Perl 5 programs into Perl 6; this 
  program may be Perl 6 itself.  Nobody knows yet what will be 
  changed and what won't.

* This is also an opportunity to redesign Perl's social structure.
  All aspects of Perl 5 development were carried out on the
  perl5-porters mailing list, and were overseen by a person known 
  as the pumpking.  This worked well for a while, but Perl has gotten 
  too big.  Larry wants to decentralize Perl 6 development.  Probably
  there will be smaller working groups, each focused on one aspect of
  Perl, such as the parser, or the pattern matching engine.

* Perl 5 is not going away.  (Why would you expect it to?  Even 
  Perl 4 hasn't gone away yet.)  Perl 5 will continue to be supported.
  Maintenance will continue on the Perl 5.6 track.  Perl 5.8 will
  appear as planned, but will probably be the final release of Perl 5.

* Larry hopes to have an alpha version of Perl 6 out by the last 
  quarter of 2001.


For the original press release about the project, and other
materials, see http://www.perl.org/perl6/

For my complete article about Perl 6, see below.

*** 

WHAT'S NEW ON THE SITE?


I've posted an article about the upcoming Perl 6 project.  Nobody
really knows what Perl 6 will be like, but Larry did drop some 
hints in his State of the Onion talk.  I also took notes from the
question-and-answer session that followed, which aren't available
anywhere else.

http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/07/perl6.html


Also, Kevin Lenzo of Carnegie Mellon University tells us about how 
he uses Perl for robotics research and applications.  (Kevin Lenzo 
is also the genius who organized the hugely successful YAPC 
conferences this year and last.)

http://perl.oreilly.com/news/carnegie_0600.html


WHAT'S NOT NEW?

Because of many conferences, the Perl5-Porters digests are running
behind.  There were many interesting developments, however; Alan
Burlison implemented a new program, which turned out to have large
implications, and Simon Cozens submitted a new 'perlhacktut' manual
page, about how to hack on the Perl core.  All this and more will be
appearing later this week.

WHAT'S COMING UP?

Coming next week, Lightning Conference Reports.  (If you were at the
conference and you want to write a Lightning Conference Report, send
me mail at mjd-tpc-report+ at plover.com.)

Thank you all.  I will be in touch again next week.

Mark Dominus 
Managing Editor



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