I’m curious about programming languages. Not because I’m creating one right now. I always was. This post is about ideas and features that I have seen in Perl 6 and found interesting. If you are curious about programming languages in general, you should take a look at these.

There are various reasons for not stealing the interesting ideas from Perl 6:

I’m trying to keep number of concepts in NGS as small as possible. If I’m not seeing huge immediate value in a concept – I skip it. Not taking anything that I think can confuse me or other programmers. I’m not talking here because someone is a beginner. I’m talking about confusing concepts. Simply because I don’t have enough resources to implement it at the moment.

Here are the interesting Perl 6 features, in no particular order (except the first one). There are also my comments whether I would like the feature in NGS or why not.

Syntax. Very expressive an terse. Perl6 has even more of it than Perl 5. Now that we got rid of the $ and friends in the room: Grammars. Would actually be nice to have something like that in NGS. Lots of operators. The most interesting concept is Metaoperators. I’m trying to keep the amount of syntax elements in NGS relatively low. There are already two syntaxes in NGS: commands and expressions. Not taking more syntax without serious need. How the “pointy block” syntax mixes with “for” syntax: for @list -> @element . NGS already has several syntaxes for Lambdas. Flow control “when” flow control. The closest NGS has is “cond” and friends, stolen from Lisp. repeat while / repeat until . It would be nice to have something like that in NGS. once . Not sure about this one. The functionality might be needed. Slips. The behaviour is frightening me: if it does expand, how do I pass a Slip if I just want to pass it, say as an item of an array? NGS uses syntax for slips: [1, 2, *myitems, 3, 4] which I think is cleaner. You know you can’t pass it because it’s syntax. .WHAT method. I stole something similar from Ruby: the inspect method.

As a special note, I have seen a welcome change from $arr[0] to @arr[0] . I think it removes confusion. (That was Perl 5 vs Perl 6).

Please don’t be offended if you are a Perl 6 hacker and you see that there is amazing feature that I have not mentioned. It could be that I’ve seen this in several other languages already or maybe I did not find it interesting or … maybe I just missed it. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment anyway.

Happy coding, in whatever language rocks your boat! Except for bash. Coding in bash will never be happy.