Fun with perl? I hope you don't mind if I get up on the stage for a minute to sell my wares of what was fun for me.
First up, there's NoMoreBraces (renamed from BraceBeGone), that lets you code Perl with all the benefits and problems with Python's whitespace compiler. I mentioned this on fwp before, but it was deep in a thread, and probably ignored. I apologize if you don't find whitespace-sensitivity to be fun. I'm not sure if I should submit this under the Acme namespace, or as a legit package (good package names wanted, privately). http://www.perl.com/braces/ But wait, theres' more! I've also got a feature-ful Perl Regex Debugger implemented, in pure perl, based off some old protype code from mjd. I don't know exactly how mjd's current debugger compares to mine, but mine does have the benefit of both a command-line and tk-based interface. http://www.perl.com/rebug/ And coming soon...a regex compiler! Compile down regexes from their perl-interpreted based environment to native C code under the hood. While there is little benefit on simple regexes /abc/, there can be an order of magnitude improvement as the regexes get more complex. For now, I've only implemented character classes, anchors and the various quantifiers working. But hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to implement the various others. (I think lexically scoped variable access from within (?{}) will be impossible, unless I have perl6's getcallernamespace). More info on this to come soon. I have yet to figure out if anyone uses complicated regexes enough that something like this would be useful. But I still think it's fun, regardless of practical benefits. Fun? You decide. Please let me know privately if you think this is horribly-unfun and that I should stay away from this stage. You can now have the stage back. Mike Lambert
