My view: The first version of PCRE was released in 1997, first Perl that supported PCRE in 2009. Claiming PCRE is "a legacy of Perl" is like saying C is a lega

My view: The first version of PCRE was released in 1997, first Perl that supported PCRE in 2009. Claiming PCRE is "a legacy of Perl" is like saying C is a legacy of C#. Calling a2p "aggressive" because it did a surprisingly good job converting awk to perl is like saying useful technology is aggressive. Perl wasn't supposed to replace awk. It was designed to integrate features of C, shell, sed, and awk into one tool. That was spectacularly useful. Perl is a high point in PL stability, still correctly running most Perl 4 scripts from the last century, with active community support for versions of Perl from 15 years ago. This is despite continuous evolution, eg adding Unicode support, in contrast to POSIX ("printable ASCII characters, space, BEL, backspace, tab, carriage return, newline, vertical tab, form feed, and null"). "Perl used to introduce ... sigills all the time in dot versions." Perl has never introduced a new sigil. Perl maintains backwards compatibility despite also evolving because it's maintained by smart and conscientious professionals. The OP discussion of the future is a continuation of that same philosophy.