Larry Wall Speaks at Google

Maybe Perl 6 will have meta-language power enough to equal the macro system? Not only does it have full-on raging macros, you can redefine the languages own syntax inline. Check out one of Larry's recent talks about STD.pm (here's a Google Tech Talk from last year, which is nowhere near as funny as Larry usually is, but is still quite informative: link to this video )for a real "when you see it, you'll shit bricks" moment. Perl 6 is far more intimidating than I ever realized. They seem to have looked at everything good about Perl (and a handful of other languages) and said, "Let's do a lot more of that." It's somewhat scary how much more of "that" they've done. So, there's macros from Lisp, lazy evalua…

There's a presentation that Larry Wall gave at Google that has a lot to do with the internals of Perl 6: link to this video Actually, to be honest, I don't recommend it, I found it surprisingly dull in delivery (sorry, Larry), but the contents were very interesting. I actually think describing Perl 6 as "having macros" is accurate, but gives the wrong impression. It doesn't "have" macros, it's made of macros. The whole language is made of macros and you are nearly begged to extend it with more grammar. Or you can throw theirs away and write your own for something. Or you can throw theirs away, take some of it as a base, and extend it. It's a wild, wacky experiment that needs to be done. Whatever happen…

There's a youtube of a 2008 Google talk at link to this video He talks a bit about error messages. I found that by searching for `message` in the transcript generated by selecting the 'Open transcript" menu option of the ... button. Hth.