I failed to see the announcement of Apocalypse 12 on OO Perl 6. While the simplifications of class design look to be exactly on target, there's plenty to stoke your perl blasting furnace if you dislike perl line noise:
The parser will make use of whitespace at this point to decide some things. For instance$obj.method + 1
is obviously a method with no arguments, while
$obj.method +1
is obviously a method with an argument.
Excellent! Let's make sure code never runs on first attempt just to reap decidedly marginal advantages in brevity.
It gets worse. Some horrible decisions seem to have been made along the way, among them the decision to use operators not currently easily available on my keyboard, namely "french quotes" « (Decimal 171 in my charset) and » (ASCII 187). What is this? APL? I don't know why I hadn't noticed this, but it stinks - in fact so much that if this ends up in the language I will probably never use it. It's hard enough to understand languages. Why it should be hard even to type them is beyond me.
Why conversations like this 77 message thread on systems compatibility wasn't a warning sign just to leave the bloody things out I don't know. Perhaps someone following the process can enlighten me. Is this some joke I'm missing or just somebody actively trying to bury perl in favour of python?
The fun is heightened by close review of the Google Groups thread. Larry sends a message with text "Can you see these -> <- chars" - and some whitespace inbetween indicating to the viewer this failed. Then in a reply somebody quotes Larry and in their reply the missing characters show up! Come on man. Give us a rest. I don't want to work with my bloody keyboard definition to use your programming language. If this stays I'm clearly gone as will so many others. They simply must be kidding. They must.
Come on Classy...
A geek like you should be able to handle this minor issue. Use The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx) to ad ? to one of the unused key-combinations on your windows-box. You know that I'm not a linux-hacker but I guess you could change key mappings by changing a text-file on your Linux-box.
...and then you will be able to use all those unreadable/ perl features.
Windows is the operative word. I use it so I don't have to worry about these things....
But thanks for the tip (I googled for a gizmo like this yesterday without any luck). I'm sure it'll be in the Perl 6 newbie guide
Claus
Posted by: Dee on May 5, 2004 10:30 AM