In article <Fl887.3199$Tj3.257727 / e420r-atl2.usenetserver.com>,
Piers Cawley  <pdcawley / iterative-software.com> wrote:
>jjenning / stetson.edu (jared l. jennings) writes:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 01:36:15AM +0900, Michael Witrant wrote:
>> > You might need another operator (or method) to concat strings. Then you
>> > could have '+' to only add elements in the numeric way. But that's
>> > incompatible with other ruby scripts.
>> 
>> Yes, that's how Perl does it: + is addition, . is string
>> concatenation. You can't have objects without using references (am i
>> right here?) so if you're using objects, you always use -> instead of . -
>> that's how objects & concatenation don't conflict in Perl.
>
>Yeah, but that's changing in Perl 6. -> is disappearing, . becomes the
>method selector, ~ becomes string concatenation, and all sorts of
>other weirdness possibly ensues.
>

I saw this in Larry's latest State of the Onion.  It really seems like 
Perl6 will be a very different language than the current incarnation 
of Perl.  This seems like a great time to convince a lot of Perl 
programmers to take a look at Ruby - either way (moving to Perl6 or to 
Ruby) will require them to learn a new language.  This seems to eliminate 
the commonly heard objection "why should I learn a new language?" 
(because unless you want to stay with Perl5 forever, you'll have to anyway) 
and thus presents a good opportunity for Ruby.

Phil