Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!nstn.ns.ca!news.cs.indiana.edu!samsung!olivea!uunet!convex!usenet From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: Ruminations on the future of Perl Message-ID: <1991Jun28.212606.19054@convex.com> Date: 28 Jun 91 21:26:06 GMT References: <1991Jun28.020603.1069@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu> Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX Lines: 109 Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com From the keyboard of worley@compass.com (Dale Worley): : It's not like it's a commercial product, it's available under : copyleft. People *will* continue to improve it, and we'll all benefit : from the result. : :My belief is that it needs a *lot* of improvement -- many times more :work than has been put into it so far. (That's the screw of going :from "program" to "product".) The present situation will only allow :for small, incremental improvements. :Of course, no one can make a commercial product out of it; the :copyleft will guarantee that anybody who tries will go broke. The one :exception is Larry -- he can make proprietary changes and keep people :from copying them! This is not true: there are companies that ship perl. Mine is one of them. Of course, we also ship GNU emacs. Sigh. :-) But I can't imagine the goal of the copyleft is to limit accessbility to perl. Notice the alternative licence it's now shipped with. What do you want added for a commercial product? Something you can hand over to kindergarteners? Or do you want marketing glossies? User manuals that teach it in a slower, more tutorial style? Interactive learning tools? Salesman who push it because they get a commission? Some of these ideas perhaps have merit. Some perhaps do not. What are you looking for? Larry does have a test organization, and a vast one: comp.lang.perl, distributed regressions testing in action. There aren't many people who are up for fixing the bugs we sometimes find. I admit that we probably couldn't handle it without Larry's dedication. If I had my druthers, I wouldn't mind seeing the following things in perl. Some are more feasible than others. 1) Replace the $~, $|, etc handle-specific i/o variables with something less painful. Maybe FILE'property or such. 2) Be able to generate C code. Be able to easily link in C code. Not have to make a stab at getting your structure formats right. 3) Real structured variables. $struct'field'subfield'subsubfield look ok. conversions between these and C structs. 3) Dump internal state as Dan Bernstein mentioned. Not rogue dumping. Keeping the whole thing on disk for each dump is a pain. 4) More knowledge of touching variables outside your scope. -w should be able to know this. This would catch more typos and potentially dangerous opeations. 5) Dynamic loading of C libraries. [should be feasible on say Suns.] 6) Ability to get call co-routines in perl from a C program, such as for string routines. 7) Optimized (k)sh2p translator. Obviously sed and awk calls are easy, but I mean catching `basename' and head and tail etc. 8) Some nice way to have perl as my shell environment. 9) Perl used as an extension language. (For editors, newsreaders, etc.) 10) Guaranteed presence on more machines. That means shipment by more vendors. Target the workstation vendors first for market penetration: sun, dec, ibm, hp, sgi, etc. 11) Shared memory variables for cooperating processes. 12) Easier IPC (or RPC) library interfaces than what's there now. 13) Lightweight threads. fork (or open(FOO, "-|") cost too much. 14) Fewer surprises for newusers. See the gotchas to know what I mean. 15) Better recovery from syntax errors. 16) More fine-grained (and determistic) signal handling. I want sigblock() etc. 17) Being able to know whether my read()s will restart or not instead of being at the mercy of the O/S I'm running under. 18) A nice, moderately-paced book for non-hackers who want to learn it. Don't get me wrong: I love the Camel book. It's just not for everyone. Maybe such users should go back and learn C and UNIX and awk and all that first before they return to the Camel book, but maybe there should be another way. 19) More applications written in perl publicly available. A place where these can be stored and inquired about. 20) More people to answer questions about it. Maybe 18 would help. 21) More people who understand the actual code well so we don't have all our eggs in one basket. Larry, look out for falling rocks. 22) A database with good access methods for all the archives of comp.lang.perl. That's all for now. --tom -- Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist "So much mail, so little time."