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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