Personally I am excited by Perl6, and a little frightened, but then again who isn't? (well maybe Larry, merlyn, chromatic, et all ;) aren't).. I think the real power of the next gen of Perl will be Parrot. That may be slightly blasphemous, but *shrug*. I haven't done my reasearch, but it would be interesting if within your perl code, instead of going to C for speed, it would be interesting if you could do something like

use Parrot::Native;
$fast_loop = sub {
   parrot_asm(
      asm_code_here;
   );
};
[download]

Or something to that effect... I mean Perl can only get better as we go along. We talked about the differences for awhile now, and honestly it simply doesn't matter until we have something we can play with and work on (read bang our collective heads until the proverbial lightbulb brightens).. I have faith in the people developing the language. I truly appreciate the RFCs in the Apocalypses, because you can peer directly into Larry's thought process in regards to issues that we deal with day in and day out writing perl code. Granted the issues I run into will be entirely different than say BrowserUK, xmath, merlyn, diotalevi, ChemBoy, BazB, etc.. because I do different things with perl than they do. But all of our collective issues are being dealt with and acknowledged. Its not like they are sitting on high, banging code, and saying "O, we should do this like that" and leaving it there. They are saying, "OK, what up next? Oh, regular expressions. Ok, what RFCs do we have for this? Hrm.. Well this one addresses this, and that one that" *span of X time with indepth discussion* "Ok, this is what regexes will look like, and this is how they relate to the issues you raised, and issues that came up during our discussions"...

</ramble> Ok so the bottom line is, Perl6 will be faster than perl5. It will provide, if you want it, better casting, and syntax notation. Alot of the issues that "real programmers" point at Perl and say "Its lousy because of X, Y, or Z" are going away or being cleaned to the point of being non-issues. Provided Parrot has been ported over to architecture A, you dont even need to use Perl6, and you will still be in good hands (provided the lang you are coding in can be translated to Parrot bytecode).. You will not have to use the new features, but you can. You don't have to give hints to the optimizer, but you can. You don't have to even write your code in the new style, as IIRC you can alter how Perl6 will read your source. So if you are really cool, read want quasi unmaintainability, you can write P5 code, but parse and convert it to P6 code during runtime...

I mean, if they are thinking about things like being able to do that, then why be afraid they will limit the language in some other way? We have always been in good hands, and I for one will continue to have faith.

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */

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