exegesis: n. an interpretation and explanation of a text, esp. Holy Writ

Exegesis 2 (May 15, 2001)
This is the first of a series of articles paralleling Larry's ``Apocalypse'' encyclicals (it's numbered 2 to keep it in sync with those Revelations). These articles will take each unveiled piece of the design for Perl 6 and demonstrate the new syntax and semantics in an annotated program.

Exegesis 3 (October 3, 2001)
In Apocalypse 3, Larry describes the changes that Perl 6 will make to operators and their operations. As with all the Apocalypses, only the new and different are presented -- just remember that the vast majority of operator-related syntax and semantics will stay precisely as they are in Perl 5.

Exegesis 4 (April 02, 2002)
In Apocalypse 4, Larry explains the fundamental changes to flow and block control in Perl 6. The changes bring fully integrated exceptions; a powerful new switch statement; a coherent mechanism for polymorphic matching; a greatly enhanced for loop; and unification of blocks, subroutines and closures.

Exegesis 5 (August 22, 2002)
Previous Apocalypses took an evolutionary approach to changing Perl's general syntax, data structures, control mechanisms, and operators. New features were added, old features removed, existing features were enhanced, extended, and simplified. But the changes described were remedial, not radical. Larry could have taken the same approach with regular expressions. Fortunately, however, he's taking a much broader view of Perl's future than that.

Exegesis 6 (August 4, 2003)
This Exegesis explores the new subroutine semantics described in Apocalypse 6. Those new semantics greatly increase the power and flexibility of subroutine definitions, providing required and optional formal parameters, named and positional arguments, a new and extended operator overloading syntax, a far more sophisticated type system, multiple dispatch, compile-time macros, currying, and subroutine wrappers.

Exegesis 7 (February 26, 2004)
Formats are Perl 5's mechanism for creating text templates with fixed-width fields. Those fields are then filled in using values from prespecified package variables. Unlike Perl 5, Perl 6 doesn't have a format keyword. Or the associated built-in formatting mechanism. Instead it has a Form.pm module. And a form function. Like a Perl 5 format statement, the form function takes a series of format (or "picture") strings, each of which is immediately followed by a suitable set of replacement values. It interpolates those values into the placeholders specified within each picture string, and returns the result.