[Info-vax] A DCL wish list of sorts...

[pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com]

On Friday, March 22, 2019 at 10:49:35 AM UTC-4, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> On 3/22/19 6:29 AM, pcanagnostopoulos at gmail.com wrote:
> > Fortunately, people designing programming languages are now stricter
> > in their specification of the lexical and syntactic elements. Well,
> > except for Perl.
> 
> Perl was mostly designed 25-30 years ago and has gotten a lot stricter
> and provided a lot more warnings and strictness capabilities in recent
> years.  It is difficult to change because people in many cases have come
> to depend on emergent behavior and scream bloody murder when any of it
> gets changed in an incompatible way.  A good example was that it was at
> one time possible (quite by accident) to include a control character in
> a variable name, but the documentation warned against doing so.
> Eventually, that was turned into a syntax error.  One person who had
> written one evil line of code with a control character in a variable
> name raised quite a ruckus in the form of long, obscenity-laced
> diatribes to the developer list accusing us of all sorts of perfidy for
> breaking documented behavior (even though what the documentation said
> was "don't do that").  People also have a habit of reading the code and
> using APIs that are not marked public and then raising a fuss when those
> APIs get removed or refactored.

Part of the problem with Perl is that it started as one guy's idea of a personal programming language and then got popular. I think some of the hacks are supposed to be fixed in Perl 6, where backward compatibility is not a goal.

My favorite are the characters that determine which value to fetch from a variable: $, @, %, &. These characters are neither operators nor part of the variable name. I love to ask Perl folks what they are called. I'd say only about 30% know they are called sigils. I believe they were to become part of the name in Perl 6, though I'm not sure if that is the case.

I suspect that, on the programming language spectrum from very informal to very formal, I'm farther to the right than most people.

~~ Paul