At 09:45 AM 12/17/00 -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote:
>On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, David Grove wrote:
>
> > Because what is the parser/lexer/tokenizer parsing? Perl? Pythonic?
> > Javanese? All of them? Thinking of just the parser as a single entity
> > seems to me to be headed into trouble unless we can define in advance what
> > type of role these dialects will play in the language, and at what point
> > they merge into a single entity and how.
>
>Now matter how we slice it, it's going to be very hard for the first
>person to twist perl6 to parse something that is both complex and very
>different from Perl6. And I'm unconvinced that this difficulty ought to
>hold up the entire process. It would be quite ironic if perl6 never gets
>off the ground because we can't figure out how to make 'use Java;' easy.
That's not going to be a problem. If 'use Java;' is trouble, well, too
darned bad for Java mode. :)
>"Little languages", on the other hand, are a somewhat different matter.
>They will presumably be not-so-complex and hence won't require such deep
>hooks, and some redundancy there won't be such a big problem.
Most of the 'little languages' can probably be handled by source filters,
honestly. I want the parser to make those filters easy to write.
(Relatively speaking, at least) Other stuff can be harder, and worst case
someone can just write their own darned parser to spit out a syntax tree
perl likes.
> > Or, perhaps a more direct question. Has anyone given any thought about how
> > this multiple-input-style thingy is going to work? Can work? Should work?
>
>That's a good question.
>
>Another route to keep in mind is spending effort working on and with
>things such as perl-byacc (and maybe even the yet-to-be-written perl-lex)
>that help turn simple "languages" into perl.
That sounds rather keen, and I'm all for it. Maybe we can roll it into the
core distribution, or one of the standard extra packages.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
