Perl ist featurecomplete


Subject: Perl ist featurecomplete
From: Martin Bialasinski (agr30+news@uni-koeln.de)
Date: Tue May 02 2000 - 21:58:32 CEST


Hi,

ich hoffe ihr verzeiht mir den kleinen englischen Text, ich fand ihn
sehr gut :-)

Ciao,
        Martin

  Perl is finished

  In a shock usenet post yesterday, Larry Wall announced a halt to all
  further development of Perl. The recently issued 5.6.0 version will
  be the last officially sanctioned version of Perl. Wall said that
  whilst adding features to the most recent revision, he simply ran
  out of keyboard characters to append to '$' for use in internal
  variables. "It was", stated Wall, "a message - we've done all we
  can".

  Wall's announcement was followed by an immediate flamewar on
  comp.lang.perl.misc about whether the post was in fact on topic in a
  Perl newsgroup.

  The final addition was the $` variable - an internal value set at
  install time which contains one of three values - "laziness" if Perl
  was installed from an RPM, "impatience" if some other binary
  distribution was used, and "hubris" if it was compiled from a
  tarball. Users have reported initial difficulties using the
  "english" name for the variable which is
  $SHIFT_AND_THE_BACKQUOTE_KEY_THING. The Activestate Win32 port is
  not affected by this problem, as all internal variables are accessed
  from an array called @JUST_ANOTHER_PERL_VARIABLE to avoid confusion.

  This follows a recent unconfirmed report that a last minute change
  was ordered to Perl 5.6.0, considered at that point to be feature
  complete. The tweak was an additional character class in regular
  expressions meaning literally "all the characters no-one ever
  types". Randal L Schwartz is said to have bitterly contested this
  addition, as it was "cheating" and "a mean way to mop up the last
  few unused characters". It is unknown if the feature is operative in
  the stable release of 5.6.0, and it does not appear on the perldoc
  perl%$!"#&*`' manual page.

  Wall's announcement went on to state that "...a language in
  syntactically complete when you find a use for every bit of the
  keyboard". Asked if he was sad that his project has reached its
  conclusion, Wall said that despite the gravity of his realisation,
  the moment was "highly magical". Wall plans to devote his newfound
  free time to his family, generating quoteworthy sayings, and
  learning PHP.

  Posted on Tue 25 Apr 08:05:29 2000 PDT Written by MikeGTN
  <mike@traumatone.com>

http://www.segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=3905b40e-05c0a760



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