I suspect that chromatic and the O'Reilly staff have already created some style guidelines for books about Perl 6, and somewhere on this list it says "Perl 6, not Perl6". While this may appear arbitary to some, it will nevertheless define the way that all official texts from O'Reilly will appear. And dare I say, as O'Reilly goes, so goes the community. {grin}

The whole distinction between "perl" and "Perl" was a similar declaration on my part during the writing of the initial Camel. I told Larry that the name of the language "disappears" when it is in the middle of the sentence, and we agreed that we could call the language Perl, and the interpreter perl (in a constant font), so that neither of them would disappear in text.

Was this completely justified in an absolute sense? Not really. It's a style decision for typographical reasons, but it also defined how an entire generation of people spelled both.

So, ease up on chromatic. He's probably quoting chapter and verse of a style guide that has been defined and agreed upon. Because of that, it'll also be how every "official" doc appears, and if you write it differently, people may understand what you mean, but they'll wonder why you're typing it differently.

... a style guide that has been defined and agreed upon

Binding on O'Reilly authors, perhaps, but not on PerlMonks.

Uh, what part of what I said would disagree with that? Not sure why you're trying to make a point here.

Sure, it's an O'Reilly standard. But I'm free to suggest to you that you also use the same standard here. You're free to reject it. What's your point?

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

If you really need whitespace between Perl and 6, shouldn't it be written Perl .6?

;-)

Yuck .Foo

I believe Google searches would be easier for 'Perl6'.

Google search tip: Stick a hyphen in your search term to indicate an optional space. Searching on perl-6 will find "perl 6" and "perl6".

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Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Update:Actually the idea below is an argument against having a space, I got confused about what the desired spelling was.

I don't know if this is the thinking behind it or not but search engines will index "perl6" differently to "perl 6". People searching for "perl 6" without quoting it in the search query will get pages that mention "perl" and "6" and unfortunately will probably not get pages with "perl6".

That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).

That said I think they're fighting an unwinnable battle, you may as well try get those ignorant Americans to spell "colour" and "centre" correctly :-).

I agree with you on the /Perl ?6/ front. But the British borrowed those awful non-phonetic spellings from the French, didn't they? Too bad for us Italy or Spain wasn't closer geographically :p

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, (Arabic, Indian?) all have consistent systems and we use them all!

Pretty much every official place that talks about Perl 6 uses the space -- web pages, books, t-shirts, documentation. It's just a preference on my part, but I find it ugly without the space. (I suspect it looks wrong to me in the same way that someone capitalizing "van der" would look to you.)

Accuracy and consistency are keys to good spelling. Pedantry is defined explicitly with negative connotations: being excessive in demonstrating one's superior learning or skill, or being ostentatious about pointing out other people's inaccuracy.

(Admittedly, an example may very well be this, my post.)

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[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

You are right, thanks for pointing that out. Pedantry is just another word for nit-picking. I am not a native english speaker so I might have streched the words meaning to far.
The point I wanted to make is that it depends on your audience and subject wether your current level of accuracy and consistency is considered appropriate. While it is perfectly possible to be a pedant without applying much accuracy and consistency (I would call this pathologic pedantry), you might have to become a bit of a pedant to yourself temporarily i.e. if you want to learn orthography or Perl, just until your new and now essential level of accuracy and consistency has become a habit.
In this positive sense pedantry lost its negative connotations sometimes, at least for me. Most other humans will most likely consider perlmonks to be pedants anyway ;)

This is just my opinion, but for me Perl 6 seems to indicate that it's just a new version of Perl, while Perl6 suggests that it's a new language. (I might just be imagining this, see TeX78 is very different from TeX, but C99 is clearly only a new version of the C standard.)

Also I recommend that you don't give too much importance to this issue. If, as you say, chromatic has said "nit", you don't have any reason to think it's a very important distinction.

Updates: Also, the Perl 6 grammar will be more sensitive to whitespace as Perl 5 is, it's not that strange that people care moer about the whitespace in the language name. :)