The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully Functional Notations

[Peter J. Holzer]

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.perl.misc.]
On 2007-06-12 08:15, Thomas F. Burdick <tburdick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 11:36 pm, Tim Bradshaw <tfb+goo... at tfeb.org> wrote:
>> On Jun 11, 8:02 am, Twisted <twisted... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Jun 11, 2:42 am, Joachim Durchholz <j... at durchholz.org> wrote:
>>
>> > > It is possible to write maintainable Perl.
>>
>> > Interesting (spoken in the tone of someone hearing about a purported
>> > sighting of Bigfoot, or maybe a UFO).
>>
>> I think it's just obvious that this is the case.  What would *stop*
>> you writing maintainable Perl?
>
> The constantly shifting target of a language.  Hell, even the parser
> has changed over time.

As with any other language I know, too (well, maybe cobol hasn't changed
in the last 10 years - I haven't looked lately).

The grammar of perl hasn't changed much since perl 5.0, which was
released in 1994. There were a few minor additions, but just about every
perl 5.0 script would still run with perl 5.8.x.

Try getting to run 13 year old C++ code with a current compiler some
time ...


> Fortunately this seems to have been solved by
> Perl 6 [*].
>
> [*] Stopping work on Perl 5 to focus on the probably never-to-be Perl
> 6 brought a surprising stability to the language.

Perl 6 started in 2000, AFAIR, when 5.005_03 was the stable release of
perl5 (with development on perl 5.6 well on the way, yes).
Maybe my memory is faulty but I don't have the impression that there was
much more change in the six years between 5.0 and and 5.005_03 than in the
seven years between 5.005 and 5.8.8 (despite everybody complaining that
perl (not Perl) is essentially unmaintable).

	hp


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   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | I know I'd be respectful of a pirate 
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