The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership

Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."

Keep them both?

[neelm]

Why not keep both on as president? That way there would always be more than one way to get something done... I'm sure that never leads to problems. /who let this python guy in the room?

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[kurtu5]

A great reason to use perl is you can publish your code GPL and still keep your code secret!

Perl gives one the ability to write very very obsfucated code. In fact I love perl. Looking at someone else's perl code is even more fun/challenging than solving suduku puzzles!

Use perl if you don't want anyone, ever, maintaing your code.

Re:Perl is Dead

[Vorondil28]

As long as Netcraft doens't confirm it, I'll keep coding.

Generalized Overloading in C++ blows away Perl

[SimHacker]

With an attitude like that, I'll bet C++ would really appeal to you, too -- you should definitely check it out! Why wait for Perl 6 when you can start learning C++ today!!! C++ has just as many cool buzzwords as Perl, and it tries to go down even more dead-end paths at once! You'll just love operator overloading and templates, and you'll want to use all its advanced features at once in every program you write! But if you don't have time to learn C++, then why not adapt its best ideas to Perl?

You'll really be amazed by Bjarne Stroustrup's brilliant extension to C++: "Generalized Overloading for C++2000 [att.com]", and I'm sure you'll want to delay the release of Perl 6 some more until all these cool features can be appropriated and hacked into the Parrot VM.

Here are some of the most amazing features of Generalized Overloading in C++2000, that you will never be able to live without, once you've tried them:

With the acceptance of the ISO C++ standard, the time has come to consider new directions for the C++ language and to revise the facilities already provided to make them more complete and consistent. A good example of a current facility that can be generalized into something much more powerful and useful is overloading. The aim of overloading is to accurately reflect the notations used in application areas. For example, overloading of + and * allows us to use the conventional notation for arithmetic operations for a variety of data types such as integers, floating point numbers (for built-in types), complex numbers, and infinite precision numbers (user-defined types). This existing C++ facility can be generalized to handle user-defined operators and overloaded whitespace.

[...] Here, I describe the more innovative and powerful mechanism for overloading whitespace. Consider x*y. In programming languages (e.g. Fortran, Pascal, and C++), this is the conventional notation for multiplying two values. However, mathematicians and physicists traditionally do not use the operator *. Instead they use simple juxtaposition to indicate multiplication. That is, for variables x and y of suitable types,

x y

means multiply x by y.

[...] Overloading Separate Forms of Whitespace

There are of course several forms of whitespace, such as space, tab, // comments, and /* */ comments. A comment is considered a single whitespace character. For example,

/* this comment is considered a single character
for overloading purposes
*/

It was soon discovered that it was essential to be able to overload the different forms of whitespace differently. For example, several heavy users of whitespace overloading found overloading of newline ('\n'), tab ('\t'), and comments as the same arithmetic operator is counterintuitive and error prone. Consider:

double z1 = x y; // obvious
double z2 = x
y; // obscure
double z3 = x /* asking for trouble */ y;

In addition, different overloading of different whitespace characters can be used to mirror conventional two-dimensional layout of computations (see below).

Stavtrup claimed that it was important to distinguish between different number of adjacent whitespace characters, but we did not find that mechanism useful. In fact, we determined it to be error-prone and omitted for Standard C++.

Overloading Missing Whitespace

After some experimentation, it was discovered that the overloading mechanism described so far did not go far enough. When using the mechanism, the physicists tended to omit the space character and write

xy

rather than

x y

This problem persisted even after the overloading rules had been clearly and repeatedly explained. What was needed wasn't just the ability to overload explicit use of whitespace, but also implicit application. This is easily ach