On Mon, Sep 11, 2000 at 04:38:01PM -0400, John Porter wrote:
> You have not addressed my (and I suspect many others') greatest concern:
> I am not a p5 hacker; nor am I a p6 hacker by dint of the fact that p6 does
> not yet exist. Can I write the prototype in pseudocode? Or should I be
> building on Topaz? :-/
>
> And what of prototyping syntactic features?
ARGH! For the 2239829th time, YES! Its even in the RFC!
"Prototypes can be written as modules, wrapper scripts around Perl 5,
Filter.pm modules, Perl5 core patches, etc..."
---------*********>>>>> SOURCE FILTERS <<<<<<<********------------
Everybody see it now?
Filter.pm is an amazingly flexible tool allowing you to muck with Perl
syntax to your heart's content. If you haven't yet, read the
perlfilter man page before going any further in this discussion. All
should be clear. You can radically alter the syntax and behavior of
Perl with Perl.
There is also Function::Override to aid in the alteration of the
behavior of core functions. On top of that, operator overloading is
helpful.
Lingua::Romana::Perligata is a perfect example of how insanely far
Perl 5 can be dragged, unfortunately, it not officially released yet.
If anyone has the CD from TPC it should be on it. Switch.pm also
makes use of source filters to alter syntax. Quantum::Superpositions
is an excellent example of implementing a fully-functioning prototype
while missing a vitual piece of the system (that being, a quantum
supercomputer).
For a bare simple, stupid example of a source filter, Semi::Semicolons
is about as simple (and stupid) as you can get.
I just implemented a prototype for RFC 208 (crypt with default salt).
It took me about 15 minutes.
(http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/src/RFC-Prototype-0.01.tar.gz)
I must admit, this was a very trivial example of prototyping, but
there ya go. Even this simple bit of code will help to flesh out
issues of configuring the salt on various OS's.
--
Michael G Schwern http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Just Another Stupid Consultant Perl6 Kwalitee Ashuranse
Sometimes these hairstyles are exaggerated beyond the laws of physics
- Unknown narrator speaking about Anime
