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Apocalypse 5 Released
Simon Cozens writes "The Apocalypses are Larry Wall's explanation of the design of Perl 6. In Apocalypse 5, Larry turns to redesigning regular expressions. He set out to intentionally 'break' a lot of the regular expression culture we're all used to, and these are the results - and they're mindblowing."
Why do we always have to keep changing regex [and many othe things]. Isn't enough that we have to learn one format for almost every language. Sure, there are perhaps easier ways to express certain logic situations, but over all, do we /need/ another regex format?
The new perl 6 regexes are crazy. They seem "weird" and awkward compared to the perl 5 ones... but then again I thought the same when I started learning perl (at version 5.6).
/x to allow for easier reading of code and allow for comments inside the regexes. Some of the new features make the regexes a bit longer to type, but in general they are significantly smaller. There's also a much better and more consistent use of different types of brackets. Not having to look at the end of the regex to understand the whole thing is going to be great. I hate having to skip the regex to look a the flags first.
:o) I also wonder what the speed of the interpreter is going to be like compared to perl5. Hopefully faster :o)
A lot of this makes a lot of sense however, especially the default
Brilliant I think. I can't wait for it to come out. I hope they make a perl5->6 translator though
Good job Larry, Damian et al.
I agree, I've used COBOL myself. For what we were doing with it when we were doing it it was the best choice, in fact probably the only choice. That's not the case anymore, just like it isn't with perl. I can see why you're sticking with COBOL, though I'd look at Java as it's probably now the data processing language of choice. I wouldn't rate perl as highly as COBOL wrt its fit in its space anymore. As to Java's maturity, I think you're under rating it pretty heavily. It's mature enough now. btw I imagine you're shop will never use .NET if maturity is a criterion, and rightly so.
development.lombardi.com
So now Perl regexs are going to be completely different from every other language and more complex than ever... wonderful.
I certainly hope that someone is going to be maintaining Perl 5. I certainly cannot see the Perl community moveing en masse to Perl 6, or whatever they decide to call it.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I've asked this elsewhere. Ruby was designed with respect to perl, but all the same keeping to the principle of least surprise (which perl does not adhere to). Now, with Perl starting to look like a grown-up, mature language, what will the major differences between Ruby and Perl be?
Stop the brainwash
perl is the practical extraction and reporting language. that's what it was originally designed for, and it's still extremely useful for that. just the other day i had to rip some statistics out of the debug output of a program, and average it together over multiple tests, outputting it into comma separated values. perl was incredibly useful for that. not everything is about text, but perl is designed for the cases where it IS about text.
perl only really starts to fail when you consider it a panacea. it will not do everything for you, and there's some things that it just plain sucks at. all languages are the same way -- they have strengths and weakness. perl will extract your data, and it will act as a quick scriupting engine, for when shell scripting just isn't powerful enough. just don't try to write an officew suite or anything in it.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
Just get the damn thing written, make it flexible enough for us to rewrite perl in perl, and kick this lazy-ass camel out the door before my grandchildren ask me when perl6 is coming out!
... great, so move on already, regexes are not the final word in pattern matching.
I don't want more powerful regular expressions. I want a more powerful pattern-matching syntax, one I can compile down to an opaque object with a bit of syntactic sugar, then use in place of a regex. I want a parser sub-language like SML or parsing primitives like haskell. Regular expressions are now turing complete thanks to perl
And what's more -- all this you're doing Larry, it's anti-hacker. It's top-down, it's engineered, it's ivory-tower theory that might sound neat and no matter how zany your presentation is, you are living in the rareified atmosphere of a language designer, and now you are starting to think that way, dispensing wisdom on The Right Way To Do Things from on high. Yes, inventing Just The Right Way to give people 1E+255 ways to do things is still looking for the perfect that's the enemy of the good, because once we have the foundations to improve on perl6, we will do it, but only if we have something to work with. It doesn't all need to be done up front.
Your extended regexes can be done as a library solution. Stop ending the world and start living in it.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If Perl 6 isn't backwards compatible, they do the same Microsoft does with Visual Basic .net: make programmers switch to other tools.
A good language can introduce new features without changing the basics. This is why PHP got so popular so fast.