Apocalypse 4 (Perl Syntax) Released 7
chromatic writes: "Larry Wall's latest explanation of Perl 6 features, Apocalypse 4 has been posted on Perl.com. That means Damian Conway's explanatory Exegesis can't be far behind. Looks like some nice simplifications this time around."
cleanup is good, 5 is a silly mess (Score:3, Interesting)
i shudder to think that i once wrote complex cgi scripts in perl 4...
i am not Frank Gehry (Score:3, Interesting)
i'm getting very excited about perl 6. like many others, the previous apocalypses had me wondering if i was going to like it or not. not that i didn't have confidence that larry's a Real Smart Guy, or that you'd be able to do nifty things with perl 6, but i was concerned about how they'd apply to my work.
i'm as fascinated with concise, powerful language structures as the next guy, but i'm a carpenter, not an architect [salon.com]. i don't do cutting edge AI or bioinformatics research. i bang out web apps. so far i'd seen Neat Things, but mostly not features that would really change my work life (ok, i like "everything is an object", and currying looks very interesting...i haven't quite figured it out yet, but i'm anxious to see what i can do with it).
however, with this apocalypse, i'm starting to get a better idea about what the next perl means to me, and i'm starting to like it. first favorite, thing, better error handling. i hate using eval for it. it works, but it's clumsy and always felt like a kludge. so turning every block into an implicit TRY block is very exciting.
second favorite thing, every block is a closure.. i haven't really grokked the implications of that yet, but, man, it sounds like a good idea. (a question to any lisp coders out there - is this idea anything like the whole s-expression thing? i thought it looked sorta similar, but all i know about lisp is what i've seen in emacs).
switch statments. who doesn't want switch statements.
it's been fascinating, getting a look at the process of designing a language through the Apocalypses and accompanying Exegesises...(how the hell do you pluralize Exegesis?). It's been a bit like watching Iron Chef. Larry grabs a whole basketful of king crabs, hacks them into ugly bits, grabs a screwy handful of ingredients, but fifteen minutes into the show, you start to get a glimmer of what's coming out of kitchen stadium. personally, i can't wait for tasting and judgement.
OT: Help with Perl6 map, foreach, and hyper. (Score:1)
What will be the difference between map and foreach in Perl6? And why are these going to be necessary when hyper-operators are going into the language? Can't these 3 be rolled into a single language feature; they seem to be the same to me.
-j
Re:OT: Help with Perl6 map, foreach, and hyper. (Score:2)
I probably don't understand your question properly, but map returns a list and foreach doesn't. Also the former is more functional, the latter more procedural. I guess it boils down to TMTOWTDI [everything2.org].
The same applies for their redunancy in the face of hyper-operators. Why scare of people who are used to procedural programming by turning Perl into a something very functional? It took me a while to get used to using map when I first started and I guess the same will apply when hyper-operators appear. Backward (and sideways) compatability for programmer's brains?