Perl 6: every concept known to computers is in there

[Nicolas Fleury]

Wayne Folta wrote:
> I usually like enormous languages, but it looks to me like there's so 
> much in v6 that language practitioners will separate into 
> mutually-incomprehensible dialects. For example, subroutine calls have 
> added 6 or 8 new symbols and feature every possible combination of 
> subroutine argument variants (positional, keyword, optional, mandatory, 
> variable-length, etc). Regular expressions have a class-like mechanism 
> for defining grammars. Regular expressions have been jerked all around 
> symbol-wise in what looks like a game of musical chairs.  (See refs at 
> end.)

I think gramar definitions is a big plus.  I program mainly in Python, 
but Perl is still my choice for heavy parsing.  The fact that regexp are 
now named rules is a fact that Perl6 is focusing on what Perl is doing 
better: parsing.  Personally, I would prefer Perl to Lex/Yacc.

> I'd love to see something like:
> 
>    def  "aa - bb":
>     return [a for a in aa if a not in bb]
> 
> (the body may or may not be correct, it's the def that I'm talking 
> about). This would handle infix, prefix, and suffix all with the same 
> notation. (Maybe even "circumfix" which I'd never heard used until I 
> read perl v6's docs.)

I prefer the statu quo.  It's an even more flexible syntax since you can 
do more that syntax overloading.  An how would you get a reference to 
that function without a name?

Regards,

Nicolas