Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
...is if Cmdr Taco is going to upgrade slashcode to Perl 6 and what he thinks of all this re-write of Perl.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
We use perl pretty much exclusively for my work (telecommunications company). It's not that we have inertia (in fact, the company standard is Java - ack), it's that we LIKE perl. It has the right combination of features that makes just about everyone in the group happy.
Yes, we do need another regexp format. Larry spends several pages explaining why, if you'd read the article.
Furthermore, 80% of your existing Perl5 regexps will work unchanged in Perl6. *, +, *?, +?, (), ?, all unchanged. Most of the backslash-letter character classes, unchanged. Dot and ^ and $ are the same for most purposes, trivial to port when they aren't. 80% of the remaining cases can be ported by changing [] to <[]> and escaping spaces or replacing them with \s or \h (which they often should have been anyway).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more. Unreadability of regexps is one of the biggest complaints people have about Perl, and this addresses those concerns head-on.
(Incidentally, people made all these same complaints the last time Perl changed regexps, when Perl5 came out. And now virtually every other popular language has recognized that the Perl5 design is better than its predecessors, and has adopted a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax or library. Larry's got a pretty good track record here.)
(BTW, the preceding incomplete post was a slip of the mouse. Mods, please kill it.)