Re: How might "Apocalypse 5" affect Ruby?

* Matthew Diephouse ([e-mail]) wrote:

Could you perhaps change your quote string too '> ' rather than just
'>'?  Ommiting the space makes reflowing more difficult.

> There's nothing to say that ruby couldn't just as easily be
> implemented.  And remember, as A5 pointed out, regexes are a language
> of their own.
>
>      /(\d+) { $1 < 582 or fail }/

I was under the impression the closures were snippets of Perl code, not
parts of the regexp itself.

>      / <#{rule_from_array}> <#{rule_from_hash}> <#{rule_from_sub()}> /

Who's syntax will differ between languages, and be completely useless in
static languages.

> You say perlish, I say huffman coding.

Huffman coding is for compression algorithms, not programming languages.
By this logic, Ruby would be improved by changing:

class Foo -> c Foo

module Foo -> m Foo

etc.

The world is not going to end because I need to type two extra
characters to achieve non-catching grouping, but it might end if I
constantly mistake [..] for it.

> > I can see lots of people looking at the new-style Perl expressions
> > and wasting time thinking "Uh?" before they remember [..] is not a
> > character class anymore, and that . really is matching everything,
> > and that whitespace needs to be escaped, and...
>
> Ahh, but it's so much clearer.

I've yet to be convinced it's "much" clearer, certainly not when the new
syntax is so similar to the new one, both of which are going to have to
co-exist for the forseable future.

[useless provocative statement removed]

> Yes. Just think... the power of full grammars in ruby. What power that
> is!

Yes, a bit less than the power of the parser frameworks we already have,
only less well defined.

> It'd be a shame not to fix the shortcomings in regexes (again...
> they're a language, not just a string).

They're not a language, they're a collection of languages.  We already
have POSIX regexps and various degrees between Perl regexp and POSIX,
now we're getting a completely new language which looks almost identical
to the old ones but which does completely different things to all
previous implimentations.

> > Well, there's no code to worry about yet; Perl 6 is, um, ages
> > away, so there's no reason to panic.
>
> Well a year to a year and a half may seem ages away to you, but not to
> me.

A year and a half is about 7% of my life, so yes, it seems a long time
to me :)

> And it won't flop. Perl is much powerful than the languages you 
> listed, including ruby, and especially the joking suggestions.

I don't think it's yet been proved that Perl is anything beyond Turing
complete ;)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  [e-mail]  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
		-- Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Dispossessed"