Comment Re:backwards compatibility? (Score 2, Insightful) 125
The problem is, really, that Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two completely separate languages. You shouldn't even bother thinking about backwards compatibility; the developers aren't. Larry stepped on that before much of anything else.
From what I've read, Regexen are staying _basically_ similar (basically), but Damian Conway being the sick evil bastard he is, they're going to incorporate some higher capabilities into the engine that look an awful lot like his Parse::RecDescent grammar parsing module.
I mean, really, at their base, he's moving around flags a little, making whitespace default insignificant, and tinkering a few flags. It's when he starts making rules and backtracking capabilities (which exist in the current language, in clunky form, as he demonstrated) that it starts getting wacky.
What it comes down to, though, is that noone should be thinking 'Oh, man, now I'll have to port all my perl to perl 6.', because Perl 5 isn't going to die out or anything, just get phased out like perl 4 - left at a stable rev for support purposes.
From what I've read, Regexen are staying _basically_ similar (basically), but Damian Conway being the sick evil bastard he is, they're going to incorporate some higher capabilities into the engine that look an awful lot like his Parse::RecDescent grammar parsing module.
I mean, really, at their base, he's moving around flags a little, making whitespace default insignificant, and tinkering a few flags. It's when he starts making rules and backtracking capabilities (which exist in the current language, in clunky form, as he demonstrated) that it starts getting wacky.
What it comes down to, though, is that noone should be thinking 'Oh, man, now I'll have to port all my perl to perl 6.', because Perl 5 isn't going to die out or anything, just get phased out like perl 4 - left at a stable rev for support purposes.
