[roch-pm] [Fwd: www.perl.com: Ilya Regularly Expresses]

Tue Oct 3 23:28:22 CDT 2000

-------- Original Message --------
From: "www.perl.com update" <onperl at lists.oreillynet.com>
Subject: www.perl.com: Ilya Regularly Expresses
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         www.perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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Hello, perl.com subscribers.

Perl 6 planning activity may be winding down, waiting for Larry's
announcement.  Nat Torkington, project manager, set a deadline 
of 25 September for new RFCs.  Adam Turoff, the librarian, has 
posted a list of overdue RFCs that have not been updated or closed 
in a week.

http://dev.perl.org/rfc/overdue.html

Nat also says:

        "I've been getting hints from Larry that he's also got a 
        couple of seriously killer improvements up his sleeve (being 
        the showman that he is, I suspect he's looking forward to 
        watching our jaws drop when he finally does tell all)."

I can hardly wait.  One idea that has kept returning to me over the
years is that Larry really *is* better than other people at designing
languages.  

I think I was first struck by this a few years ago.  I knew that
"\Lfoo" is compiled as if you had written lc("foo"), and that "\ubar"
is compiled as if you had written ucfirst("bar"); that is how \L and
\u are implemented.  When you write

        "\u\LHELLO, WORLD"

it compiles to 

        ucfirst(lc("HELLO, WORLD"))

and the result is "Hello, world", with an initial capital 'H'.

On a whim, I tried

        "\L\uhello, world"

instead.  I 'knew' that this would compile to 

        lc(ucfirst("HELLO, WORLD"))

so the result would be

        "hello, world"

with no capital 'H' because the lc() would undo the effect of the
ucfirst().  

But it turns out I was wrong.  I got an initial capital H anyway.  
I was amazed---even though I had put the \L and the \u in the wrong
order, Perl had done the 'right thing'.  I posted to perl5-porters
about it, saying "I knew it wouldn't work, but it *did* work!", and
Larry replied "Fancy that.  :-)"

When Larry wrote the code for \L and \u, he anticipated that someone
might accidentally write them in the wrong order, and he made Perl so
that if it sees the sequence "\L\u" in a string, it pretends that you
wrote "\u\L" instead.

This is an amazing idea, but I don't think many people would have had
the nerve to actually implement it.  In the following years reading
the perl5-porters list, I've seen many times when Larry would suggest
an amazing and weird idea which would, had anyone else proposed it,
have been ridiculed and discarded.  Not all of Larry's ideas were good
ones, but he's shown an astounding ability over the years to come up
with ideas that other people didn't, and to make them work well
together.  

I really hope he will be able to do something with the stew of Perl 6
ideas that people have churned out, because if anyone can, it's him.

***

WHAT'S NEW ON THE SITE?

At long last we have Joe Johnston's interview of Ilya Zakharevich.
Ilya, as you probably know by now, has been a major figure in the 
Perl world for many years, contributing Perl 5's operator overloading
feature, much of the current shape of the regex engine, the OS/2 port,
and the FreezeThaw, Devel::Peek, Math::Pari, and Term::Readline 
modules.  (Gurusamy Sarathy, the pumpking for 5.005 and 5.6.0, once 
told me that he thought there was more of Ilya's code in Perl than 
anyone else's, except for Larry's.) 

Joe's interview is wide-ranging.  Ilya talks about the Perl 6 effort, 
why he thinks that Perl is not well-suited for text manipulation, and 
what changes would make it better; whether the Russian education 
system is effective; and whether Perl 6 is a good idea.

http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/ilya.html

***

In Perl 6 related news, Simon Cozens sent an article about Sapphire,
which was Simon's attempt to see how much of Perl he could
re-implement in one week.  (The answer: Quite a lot!)  Simon discusses
why he wrote Sapphire and what lessons can be learned from it.

http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/ilya.html

***

COMING UP

On no particular schedule, we should have an article from Walt
Mankowski about how Perl helped him win the office football pool, a
new series of introductory articles from Doug Sheppard, and a series
of articles from Michael Schwern about object-oriented interfaces to
SQL databases and, conversely, using SQL databases to implement
persistent objects.  We also hope to have a report from YAPC::Europe,
which starts Friday, and news about Larry's keynote address at the 4th
Annual Linux Showcase and Conference next month.

Thank you all.  I will be in touch again in a week or two.

Mark Dominus 
Managing Editor 

============================================================
ApacheCon Europe 2000, 23-25 October 2000
Olympia Conference Centre, London, England.

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and advanced users to learn how you can get the most out of Apache.
Learn directly from those who helped build the software supporting
more than half of the web sites in the Internet today.
www.apachecon.com

============================================================

Profiles: Ilya Regularly Expresses
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/ilya.html?wwwrrr_20000919.txt
Ilya Zakharevich, a major contributor to Perl 5,  talks about
Perl 6 effort, why he thinks that Perl is not well-suited for
text manipulation, and what changes would make it better;
whether the Russian education system is effective; and whether
Perl 6 is a good idea. 

Article: Sapphire
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/sapphire.html?wwwrrr_20000919.txt
Can one person rewrite Perl from scratch?  

Guide to the Perl 6 Working Groups
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/perl6mail.html?wwwrrr_20000919.txt
Perl 6 discussion and planning are continuing at a furious rate
and will probably continue to do so, at least until next month
when Larry announces the shape of Perl 6 at the Linux Expo. In
the meantime, here's a summary of the main Perl 6 working groups
and discussion lists, along with an explanation of what the
groups are about.

Profiles: Damian Conway Talks Shop
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/08/conway.html?wwwrrr_20000919.txt
The author of Object-Oriented Perl talks about the Dark Art of
programming, motivations for taking on projects, and the
"deification" of technology.

Guide to the Perl 6 Working Groups
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/09/06/index.html?wwwrrr_20000919.txt
[09/06/2000]

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