-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In article <20050205214842.GA6381 / velutha>,
Esteban Manchado VeláÛquez  <zoso / foton.es> wrote:
>
>   But, the only application/library that I recall it had problems with Perl
>5.6 is Request Tracker, and then again, it worked, but had some problems with
>character set conversion (well, until some version, when they finally dropped
>Perl 5.6 support altogether, IIRC). Every Perl application and especially,
>library, that I recall installing in the past few years, worked just fine in
>Perl 5.6.
>
>   So, perhaps the only language/community that maintains that sort of
>compatibility is Perl, but is what I use (partly), and I'm used to that, and I
>find that a good thing :-)
>

_ Perl was not always this way. There was a big change from
version 4 to 5 and even the very minor change from 5.6 to
5.8 things broke... I think it's a bit unfair to compare
an essentially fixed language like perl5 that has minor bugfix
releases to ruby. When Ruby gets to version 5, I imagine things
will be much more stable.  

_ There is no free lunch... I understand your point, but I don't
see any real answer. Until people can make a living at writing
Ruby libraries, they have no incentive for backwards
compatiblity. There's a definite chicken and egg problem here,
but at least it's not the bad old days when you had to recompile
perl or tcl from scratch to use a new library.

_ To me it seems like there has been a very large leap in
functionality from 1.6 to 1.8 and that a sort of bootstrap
level has been reached. It really should have been a 2.0 
release, but since Ruby 2.0 has very special meaning that's
not in the cards. I would hope that things stablize
in the future, but it's still early days and Ruby is certainly
no worse in this regard than any other language I've seen
develop. 

_ Booker C. Bense 


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBQhOX/GTWTAjn5N/lAQGlLwP+O+CVupU3CszaSI55AZTmNGL42TsJUJF8
pcocjE80aU92hMI1foognmEN6Hx7Ghf6nvlDUnC4GLft6G85T89w2Se9LressOWa
sBwkxHPgMTTdw6oGiYIQ6hyZ6tq25YTQEsdkTJmSpHnEJPcDwxjZTvgTNWXz1v2b
jdv5dqlRGbk=
=UK2g
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----