On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 07:18:54PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> Adam Turoff wrote:
> > 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).
>
> Larry brought this up in his talk. Of course, I believe that Larry was
> sleep-deprived at the time, too. ;)
>
> > It was late though. Might have been sleep deprevation talking.
Dammit, I'm not finding the message in the thread, but someone casually
mentioned writing the important bits of parsing Perl in Perl5, generating
bytecode, and starting Perl6 by writing the bytecode loader. (Apologies
for not finding the attribution. Please stand up and elucidate if
you've had this idea as well.)
That approach does have a significant amount of merit. Smalltalk, FORTH,
Lisp (etc.), and Java work in that manner. That would pose a bootstrapping
problem if there were no Perl5 to start with. That should also aid in the
testing effort.
Z.
