The State of the Onion 5
by Simon CozensJuly 25, 2001
Larry's State of the Onion presentation this year was, as every year, completely different from previous years. As he noted, previous talks have been about chemistry, theology, biology, and music; this year, for once, Larry actually talked about Perl.
And this year the format was rather different. Based on the success of the lightning talks at previous Perl conferences, Larry decided to adopt this for his presentation - he gave us thirty-three lightning talks of fifty-five seconds each, with his daughter Heidi ruthlessly manning the bell. So ruthless, in fact, that Larry had to encourage us to laugh quickly to avoid cutting into his talking time.
Perl 6 and Apocalypses
Larry Wall during his State of the Onion speech at TPC 5. Larry's time keeper for the lightening rounds was Heidi Alayne Wall. For more on TPC 5 and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, visit O'Reilly Network's conference coverage page. Photo courtesty D. Story/J. Blanchard/O'Reilly Network |
Larry talked about both Perl 5 and Perl 6. He noted that many talented people were putting dedication and love into Perl 5, and Perl 5 is doing great. So much for Perl 5.
Perl 6 was obviously the major focus of Larry's talk, with each lightning talk laying out the major points of an Apocalypse. As before, Apocalypses mirrored chapters of the Camel book, Programming Perl.
Larry hinted that he'd already recanted part of the second Apocalypse; the third Apocalypse was due to come out, but Larry got sick. On the other hand, this gave him a chance to go slowly, and to do it right.
So his lightning talks really began with apocalypse three, about
operators. Larry noted that there had been a number of very specific
proposals, but he wanted to concentrate on generalities. He also
said that he was wavering on the idea of user-defined operators, and
particularly Unicode operators. -> will become . - start accepting
that now. This will mean that the concatenation operator will have to
change, and this will probably become ~.
The bell tolled, and so Larry had to move onto talk four - control
structures. To loud applause, he announced that Perl 6 would include a
switch statement; to some bemusement, however, he let on that it would
be called "given" - case statements would be called "when". Another
notable renaming: "local" will become "temp".
Larry reiterated the need for optional type and property declarations; this isn't the same as typing, but it's a way of specifying metadata about a variable or subroutine. As you supply Perl with more metadata about variables, it will gain efficiency in terms of storage and manipulation. As the bell went, Larry was just explaining how 90% of code wouldn't get that much faster but...
Regular Expressions, Formats, Packages and Modules
Larry's been thinking a lot about direct assignment to variables from within a regular expressions, but has decided this isn't the real problem - the real problem is that people want to build up structures of anonymous hashes or arrays from a regular expression.
There will be set operations on characters classes: for instance, you'll
be able to specify a match of all letters without the vowels. Actually,
this will probably be in Perl 5 as well. There was also time to tell us
that he'd like the /x modifier to be on by default.
The next talk was about subroutines. Prototypes will be extended into a
complete type signature system; the sub keyword would be discarded on
closures - in fact, any curly braces which are not immediately
recognisable will be assumed to be a closure. Parameters to closures
will be "self-identifying", such as $^a and $^b.
Larry said that formats would be a module, so he didn't have to say anything more about it.
The reference talk opened to the statement that pseudo-hashes must die;
there was loud applause. Larry reiterated that dereferences will be
assumed when a scalar is followed by braces - that is to say, what is
now $foo->[$a] will be reduced to $foo[$a] in Perl 6. This will
require prohibiting whitespace before hash subscripts.
In terms of data types, there will be compact arrays; pseudo-hashes
will be replaced by opaque objects with named parameters. The =>
operator will now create a pair type; the range operators will create
a slightly different type of pair, which gets expanded out to a range on
demand.
There will be a distinction between classes
and modules. Within a class or a module, there will be subpackages:
there will be no more need to type out Myclass::SubclassA::SubclassB;
just like Unix has relative pathnames and directories, Perl will have
modules that can be specified as relative namespaces.
On the theme of modules, module names would be extended to include
metadata on the version and the author's name. The default use
statement would allow the version and author's name to be wildcards.
There will also be virtual interface modules, and better automation
of documentation based on module metadata.
Objects should be easy to declare and have accessible metadata.
When you put an attribute onto the module, it will appear as a variable
inside of the class; outside of the class, it can be accessed as a
method. There will also be optional multimethods, and syntax like
Class.bless($ref) to bless a reference into a class.
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