Re: Language functionality (was: Re: another mysterious segfault)

[Tim Nelson]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Mark Burgess wrote:

> The main reason I say that perl is "primitve" in this context is that it
> does not have datatypes or type checking. That makes it possible for
> objects to be totally misrepresented.

        Ok, I understand your definition of primitive :).  Thanks.

> It also makes it very difficult to return structured objects from data.

	?  I do this all the time, unless you have a different meaning of 
structured object than I do.  Can you point me at information about or an 
example of something that returns structured objects from data (whether 
in Perl or something else)?

> It would be difficult to do things like file copying in perl, because 
> file copying needs to understand objects that have holes in them, which 
> could can't do from the high level interface.

	Not sure I understand objects with holes in them -- Google returns 
nothing relevant :).  Can you point me at information or an example?

> It is possible that Perl 6 will solve this kind of thing,

	I know it has data types and type-checking (in fact it lets you 
choose whether you want data types on a per-variable basis :) ).  But no 
point drooling over Perl6; it's not out yet :).

> but I believe that Perl has a different destiny.

	To work endlessly on version 6 until it becomes irrelevant?  :) 
With any luck, the unification of scripting language backends into Parrot 
will at least go ahead (hopefully allowing scripts to call functions in 
other languages).

> Cfengine 3 will be written in a simple dialect of C++, to borrow from 
> the vast standard libraries that have been developed for it. So it 
> should combine the best of both worlds.

	I certainly don't expect you to write it in Perl :), and that's 
not what I'm after here; I just want to understand criticisms of Perl, 
because they may point out better ways of doing things that I will run 
into in the future.

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Tim Nelson
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