Damian Conway Publishes Exegesis 5 125
prostoalex writes "Come gather round Mongers, whatever you code,
And admit that your forehead's about to explode,
'Cos Perl patterns induce complete brain overload,
If there's source code you should be maintainin',
Then you better start learnin' Perl 6 patterns soon, For the regexes, they are a-changin'. This remix of Bob Dylan serves as an epigraph to Exegesis 5."
Re:Monty Python and the Holy Grail Sinking Castle (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:backwards compatibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is standardising cutting-edge (even compared to most lisp + prolog AI-related parsing stuff, and that's always ad-hoc) parser as part of the standard language.
Re:Ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't like it, you don't have to port it.
There are still people using emacs 18 to edit their files because it's small and it works.
There are still people running Windows 98 to run their games because it works.
Nobody's forcing you to move to Perl 6. That's the beauty of Open Source. Perl 5 is going to be developed for a long time to come. Don't give up hope.
-Dom
Looks like it's needed, but ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Beautiful! (Score:3, Insightful)
Regex's in Perl have accumulated too much cruft to be called regular expressions anymore. So now they're full grammers.
That's right. Now you can pattern match with a very readable grammer syntax that is easily decorated with Perl code to do parsing. YACC for Perl. You can find packages for this on CPAN, but this is integrated with the language.
No whining about the bad old days of Perl regex syntax for me... now I'm actually excited by the prospect of needing to buy a new llama book.
Re:Perl 6 will be largely backward compatible (Score:0, Insightful)
DON'T PANIC (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm glad that support for the
Re:Monty Python and the Holy Grail Sinking Castle (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget, the last one stayed up. And it was the strongest castle in all of Britian.
Let me get this straight (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:backwards compatibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
From what I've read, Regexen are staying _basically_ similar (basically), but Damian Conway being the sick evil bastard he is, they're going to incorporate some higher capabilities into the engine that look an awful lot like his Parse::RecDescent [cpan.org] grammar parsing module.
I mean, really, at their base, he's moving around flags a little, making whitespace default insignificant, and tinkering a few flags. It's when he starts making rules and backtracking capabilities (which exist in the current language, in clunky form, as he demonstrated) that it starts getting wacky.
What it comes down to, though, is that noone should be thinking 'Oh, man, now I'll have to port all my perl to perl 6.', because Perl 5 isn't going to die out or anything, just get phased out like perl 4 - left at a stable rev for support purposes.