On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 05:53:45PM -0500, Miller, Hugh wrote: : Is there something for perl analogous to the sort of formal presentation : seen in e.g., Robin Milner's "Definition of Standard ML" ?
The closest we've gotten to anything "formal" is what John is working on right now. We've historically been more into vigor than rigor... Unless you count STD.pm as a formal grammar, which it kind of is. But it doesn't say much of anything about semantics. : Is there any confluence between things perl and things found in the : literature on partial evaluation (e.g., John Launchbury's thesis, papers : etc.) ? Beats me. Speaking for myself, there's too much literature and not enough time, so I mostly just ignore the literature and try to invent the things Perl needs, or find better ways of incorporating ideas already percolating in the Perl community. Then when someone like you points out something related in the literature, it sometimes happens that someone (usually someone other than me) will go off somewhere and read some of it and report if there are some good ideas to steal somehow. :) Larry
