From owner-freebsd-current Wed Mar 13 15:53:39 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id PAA05699 for current-outgoing; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 15:53:39 -0800 (PST) Received: (from hsu@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id PAA05684 for current@FreeBSD.org; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 15:53:36 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 15:53:36 -0800 (PST) From: Jeffrey Hsu Message-Id: <199603132353.PAA05684@freefall.freebsd.org> To: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: To pick a (perl) fight! Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I'd say that until Larry writes a Perl 5 book so that there's some easily accessible documentation for it then There are over a hundred pages in the perl 5 man pages split out over 27 sections. I believe free, printable, and searchable on-line man pages qualifies as easily accessible documentation. most people will stick with perl 4 unless they have a particular need for perl5. Like I write all my scripts in perl5 now? :-) Given that the momentum is very much against switching to perl 5 (for this and similar reasons) I think we'd stay more compatible with the rest of the world sticking with perl 4 for the moment. Strange, I assess the current momentum as obsoleting perl4 and going to perl5. We'd also have to fix all the perl code we use if we switch to perl 5. We will have to do this sooner or later. A lazy short-cut is to change the first line of the scripts to read #!perl4. Furthermore, perl5 is mostly compatible w/ perl4 and the differences are well-documented. I've been running w/ perl5 as the default perl on my system since early last year.