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."

Comments

Regex

[inflex]

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?

New regexes

[Dacmot]

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).

A lot of this makes a lot of sense however, especially the default /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.

Brilliant I think. I can't wait for it to come out. I hope they make a perl5->6 translator though :o) I also wonder what the speed of the interpreter is going to be like compared to perl5. Hopefully faster :o)

Good job Larry, Damian et al.

Great

[duffbeer703]

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.