Mailing List Archive

Perl Quirks
As a background task I’ve been building a list of Perl Quirks: misfeatures; historical things we have to live with;  things that might seem odd to beginners, but they’re that way for a reason, etc. This has had input from a handful of people, and I think it’s ready for a wider audience:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-9ADyOsmuJ6mO5jZG0w8J7INwj8jTpbWdWJ4l4kqqBg/edit?usp=sharing

Think of it as "Perl: the WTF bits".

At the moment we’re still trying to build a list of these – please don’t start filling the document with suggestions for fixing quirks. Ways you can help:

1. Add a comment if you don’t understand a quirk. E.g. Nick added several where I didn’t understand what he meant, so we iterated.
2. If you can think of missing quirks, either add them to the document, or *email them to me* (let’s not have a long sprawling thread on p5p please).

Once the list settles down, we’ll work through it and classify each one as "staying as is", "can’t be removed but can be improved", "we’d like to remove this", etc.

This is one of the activities we identified in the Perl 7 planning, along with resolving the outstanding experiments, etc.

Neil
Re: Perl Quirks [ In reply to ]
Thank you to everyone who has added quirks, commented on the doc, or emailed me additions.

I’ve been through and addressed every comment, added examples, tried to clarify things, etc. Some entries got dropped, such as those of the form "it’s a quirk that Perl doesn’t have XYZ feature".

Next week the PSC will work through the document, ruling on whether we think each one is a quirk, and whether we want to propose an RFC to address it.

So you have a week left, if you want to go through and potentially propose additional quirks, or add comments / suggestions on the existing ones:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-9ADyOsmuJ6mO5jZG0w8J7INwj8jTpbWdWJ4l4kqqBg/edit?usp=sharing

Neil
Re: Perl Quirks [ In reply to ]
On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 05:11:24PM +0100, Neil Bowers wrote:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-9ADyOsmuJ6mO5jZG0w8J7INwj8jTpbWdWJ4l4kqqBg/edit?usp=sharing

Can this document be released to public access?

--
Joel Roth
Re: Perl Quirks [ In reply to ]
Hi Joel,
> Can [the Perl Quirks google doc] be released to public access?

It’s locked down at the moment, because Rik, Paul, and I are working through it, and adding notes and editing as we go.

I know there are additional quirks that people want to add – once we finish this first pass through, I’ll open up the document again, and note that on p5p.

Neil