Re: Perl's parser and lexer will likely be in Perl (was Re: RFC 334 (v1) I'm {STILL} trying to understand this...)

[Adam Turoff]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 06:53:47PM +1100, Jeremy Howard wrote:
> Leon Brocard wrote:
> > Hmmm, I wonder what kind of subset would be necessary - surely the
> > most useful constructs are also the most complicated...
>
> We could learn quite a bit by looking through the code from
> Parse::RecDescent, switch.pm, and friends. Damian's done a lot of parsing
> (including parsing Perl) with Perl, so this would be a good place to start.
> 
> In terms of bootstrapping, however, we either need to:
>  - Write the Perl subset in C (or some other portable language), or
>  - Use Perl 5 as the 'Perl subset', and distribute that with Perl 6.

Gisle and I were talking about this tonight, and it *might* be possible
to write the Perl tokenizer in a Perl[56] regex, which is more easily 
parsable in C.  All of a sudden, toke.c is replaced by toke.re, which
would be much more legible to this community (which is more of a strike
against toke.c instead of a benefit of some toke.re).  That would certainly
qualify as implementing the Perl grammar in Perl, and might even be
achievable.   (*gasp!*)

It was late though.  Might have been sleep deprevation talking.

Z.