Perl 6: every concept known to computers is in there

[Wayne Folta]

I hadn't really followed the state of perl for quite a few years. When 
Irecently found python, it just suited me and now I've switched. (And 
am contributing to an open-source python project. Great fun!)

Someone here mentioned perl 6, so I decided to look in on it and all I 
can say is it looks like every concept from every computer course, 
article, and book is now included.

I usually like enormous languages, but it looks to me like there's so 
much in v6 that language practitioners will separate into 
mutually-incomprehensible dialects. For example, subroutine calls have 
added 6 or 8 new symbols and feature every possible combination of 
subroutine argument variants (positional, keyword, optional, mandatory, 
variable-length, etc). Regular expressions have a class-like mechanism 
for defining grammars. Regular expressions have been jerked all around 
symbol-wise in what looks like a game of musical chairs.  (See refs at 
end.)

Lots of good ideas that might be interesting to consider for python 
(translated into pythonic pentameter, of course). But v6 also reminds 
me of the US television standard, NTSC, which some say stands for 
"Never Twice The Same Color".

Actually, they've also overhauled their OO model and it looks like 
operator overloading is quite nicely done. As an aside, I'm not a fan 
of how python maps symbols to names for such things. If you want to 
redefine, say, "-" for a set-like operation, you have to either 
remember or lookup to see if it's __sub__ or __subtract__ or __minus__ 
or...

I'd love to see something like:

    def  "aa - bb":
	return [a for a in aa if a not in bb]

(the body may or may not be correct, it's the def that I'm talking 
about). This would handle infix, prefix, and suffix all with the same 
notation. (Maybe even "circumfix" which I'd never heard used until I 
read perl v6's docs.)

    http://dev.perl.org/perl6/synopsis/S05.html
    http://dev.perl.org/perl6/synopsis/S06.html