Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 19:49:10 +0000 From: nik@blueberry.co.uk (Nik Clayton) To: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith), ejs@bfd.com, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? We do! Message-ID: <Mutt.19961119194910.nik@blueberry.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199611191814.LAA09210@phaeton.artisoft.com>; from Terry Lambert on Nov 19, 1996 11:14:09 -0700 References: <199611190132.MAA25471@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> <199611191814.LAA09210@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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Terry Lambert writes: > This is the rub. PERL is not stable over the release cycle period for > FreeBSD. People are *always* complaining "why don't you upgrade your > PERL?", even when it it well known that an upgrade frequently requires > updating all of the PERL-dependent scripts to the new syntax, since > the syntax is not sufficiently stable. As someone who spends a reasonable amount of the working day coding in Perl, I don't think this is a particularly valid point, particularly in comparison to the moving target that is Tcl/Tk. In the past four years Perl 4.036 (/usr/bin/perl on 2.1.5 and below) has been the standard, rock-solid version on the 4.branch, while 5.0 was the new, OO biased version. Even given that, the changes from 5.000 to 5.003 have been bug fixes, with very few alterations to syntax at all. There is an issue moving from 4.036 to 5.x, as the syntax did change in a few places between the two -- not counting the option of a new OOish syntax, which wouldn't break older scripts anyway. Most obviously where '@' in strings suddenly needed to backslash-escaped. This broke a lot of things that dealt with e-mail addresses. But in the past 2 years (and 2 years ago I was running FreeBSD 2.0 with Perl 5.mumble) I haven't seen any clean Perl code that would run on 5.000 but wouldn't run on 5.003. Not much in the way of hard facts there, but this seems to be an opinion only thread anyway. Having said that, I don't think Perl should be moved to the base system anyway (assuming that base system is whatever you get when you install bin.xx for the first time). But this is for the same reason I don't particularly want tcl in there either -- they're extensions to the system -- I have no objections to seeing a new dist category, something like 'cool-things-we-think-you'll-enjoy', but I tend to prefer to build these things myself. Of course, if that is what we're talking about then you can ignore that last paragraph :-) N -- --+=[ Blueberry Hill Blueberry New Media ]=+-- --+=[ http://www.blueberry.co.uk/ 1/9 Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, ]=+-- --+=[ WebMaster@blueberry.co.uk London, England, SW10 0XE ]=+-- --+=[ Where am I going? And what am I doing in this handbasket? ]ENTP
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