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The end of perl?

http://www.segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=3905b40e-05c0a760

 Perl is finished

 In a shock usenet post yesterday, Larry Wall announced a halt to all
 further development of Perl. The recently issued 5.6.0 version will be the
 last officially sanctioned version of Perl. Wall said that whilst adding
 features to the most recent revision, he simply ran out of keyboard
 characters to append to '$' for use in internal variables. "It was", stated
 Wall, "a message - we've done all we can".

 Wall's announcement was followed by an immediate flamewar on
 comp.lang.perl.misc about whether the post was in fact on topic in a Perl
 newsgroup.

 The final addition was the $` variable - an internal value set at install
 time which contains one of three values - "laziness" if Perl was installed
 from an RPM, "impatience" if some other binary distribution was used, and
 "hubris" if it was compiled from a tarball. Users have reported initial
 difficulties using the "english" name for the variable which is
 $SHIFT_AND_THE_BACKQUOTE_KEY_THING. The Activestate Win32 port is not
 affected by this problem, as all internal variables are accessed from an
 array called @JUST_ANOTHER_PERL_VARIABLE to avoid confusion.

 This follows a recent unconfirmed report that a last minute change was
 ordered to Perl 5.6.0, considered at that point to be feature complete. The
 tweak was an additional character class in regular expressions meaning
 literally "all the characters no-one ever types". Randal L Schwartz is said
 to have bitterly contested this addition, as it was "cheating" and "a mean
 way to mop up the last few unused characters". It is unknown if the feature
 is operative in the stable release of 5.6.0, and it does not appear on the
 perldoc perl%$!"#&*`' manual page.

 Wall's announcement went on to state that "...a language in syntactically
 complete when you find a use for every bit of the keyboard". Asked if he
 was sad that his project has reached its conclusion, Wall said that despite
 the gravity of his realisation, the moment was "highly magical". Wall plans
 to devote his newfound free time to his family, generating quoteworthy
 sayings, and learning PHP. 
     
  Posted on Tue 25 Apr 08:05:29 2000 PDT
  Written by MikeGTN <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Just I ROTFLMAOd

n.