Lack of Perl 5 implementations was Re: Does Microsoft like Perl and PHP????

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 09:37 +0100, Steve Mynott wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 09:23:30AM +0100, Jonathan Stowe typed:
> 
> > More recently they may have slightly alienated the Perl community with
> > the "Dynamic Language Runtime" with support for Python and Ruby - of
> > course this wasn't deliberate on Microsoft's part, it's just that work
> > was already underway to have those languages run on the CLR. You can
> > search the archives of this list for a flavour of the positions that
> > would make Perl running there unlikely.
> 
> Although Microsoft isn't exactly my favourite software company this
> does seem a little unfair.  
> 
> Why is it Microsoft's fault the Perl syntax is so complex that there
> is only one implementation of Perl in C?  And that this is basically
> the specification of the language as well.
> 

Er quite, this was precisely the point that was informing the above.
Python and Ruby were specified such that making them run on alternative
runtime platforms was possible and the work was already being done when
Microsoft got on board with the "DLR". It's a given that Perl isn't
going to join that party.

> Also there are versions of Python and Ruby that run on Java!  So
> is it Sun's fault that noone has written Perl 5 or 6 in Java?

No for Perl 5 it's Larry's fault, for Perl 6 it is everyone else.

/J\