That would have to be one huge massive kludge of uggly to justify something as drastic as a change of name.
Sure, the problem might be solved temporarilly. The same problem will come back in due time. In the meantime, the language previously known as pike will loose momentum and in the third or fourth incarnation it will probably be dead outside of the core. Just look at what happened to bash and bash2. Sure, some people use bash2 for the added features - most people still havent bothered even though it is their most used application. It's just not worth the PITA to upgrade.
I'd vore for every now and then (with a major release?) dropping backwardscompability. Perhaps there should be some sort of hefty penalty for commiting code that doesn't follow the official pike naming conventions (which BTW is something that I've completetly failed to get any sort of grips on).
/ Peter Lundqvist (disjunkt)
Previous text:
2003-01-06 22:31: Subject: Re: Inconsistency.
That doesn't address the central issue, which is that there will be two slightly different languages that have the same name. We can device any amount of pragmas and fancy compatibility systems, but every time we do we also invariably add complexity which makes everything more confusing for users. I.e. it gets harder to understand what is meant with the language "Pike".
I think it only could be worth the added confusion if all these ugly spots are fixed in one go, where "fixed" implies that there are no compatibility kludges. This gives a language that is close to but not quite Pike, and the best way then to limit the confusion is to call it something else.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS