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

[Nicholas Clark]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 01:18:39PM -0400, Ken Fox wrote:
> The other down-side is that we'd be doing a whole lot of custom work designed
> just for parsing Perl instead of creating something more general and powerful
> that can be used for other problems as well. For example, I'd imagine the PDL
> folks would much rather extend a recursive-descent parser with back-tracking
> than an LR(k) monstrosity.

Not that I know anything about how to write a parser. But anecdotal evidence
from all the syntax highlighting editors etc. is that perl is the hardest
thing to parse. Hence if perl6 contains a generic parser powerful enough to
parse perl (if this can be done), to me this would suggest that it would
allow a lot of other people to use it to rapidly implement parsers for just
about anything else.

Nicholas Clark