Perl 6 Tablets: Ready for Early Review
Tue, 25-Jan-2011 by
Tom Hukins
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In November, I wrote a <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/11/perl-6-tablets-first-progress.html">progress report</a> about work beginning on the <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_tablets">Perl 6 Tablets</a> grant. These tablets aim to offer both an <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/08/2010q3-grant-proposal-perl-6-t.html">in-depth tutorial and reference for Perl 6</a>.
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Herbert Breunung, the tablets' author, has done considerable work since then on the overall structure of this documentation as well as describing particular details of the Perl 6 language. The tablets have reached a stage where we welcome feedback from anyone interested in reading them.
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Of course, much work remains, but Herbert has finished writing the <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_intro_tablet">introduction</a> and <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_language_design_tablet">language design</a> tablets. The <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_variable_tablet">variables</a> tablet and appendices for <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_index_tablet">ops, built-ins and methods</a>, <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_lookup_tablet">cheat sheets and summary tables</a>, <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?best_of_perl_6_tablet">best of Perl 6</a> and <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_links_tablet">links</a> near completion.
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Other tablets contain roughly sketched details, particularly tablets 2 to 5. So, please <a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6_tablets">take a look</a> and leave feedback below. It doesn't matter how much or how little experience you have of Perl 6: please let us know what you think so far.
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Comments (2)
While most of the Unicode specs looked quite great, it seems like no implementation actually implemented the "grapheme" level of it.
Please, please, please language implementers do it.
I know it's hard, it's difficult, it's frustrating, but please stop treating Strings as "a bunch of bytes/chars/ints in an Array".
I would really love to see a language which gets Unicode right. An implementation where getting the length of a String is _always_ correct, not just "we just take the array length" or "use only ASCII then". The same for indexed access, comparisons, etc.
Perl 6 could be the first programming language with Unicode support ever. That would be really great.
Steve,
The Perl 6 Tablets provide documentation of how Perl 6 works, not a specification for how it should work. What do you think the tablets should contain to help deal with your concerns?
Thanks,
Tom
