On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 07:55:10PM +0000, Simon Cozens wrote:
> Secondly and more importantly, it guarantees that we've got a copy of Perl on
> hand before Perl 6 is built. This allows us to reduce the level of
> preprocessor muddling by effectively generating the C source to Perl 6 from
> templates and preprocessing. For instance, I expect to see a little macro
> language develop for specifying vtable methods, which, when preprocessed,
> would also generate the vtables and their corresponding enums. I'd also like
> to see Perl choose whether or not a function should invoke the native C
> library's implementation or define its own.
>
> What do people think?
macro languages and symbolic debuggers don't mix well. We should be mindful
of this if we're going to be writing a lot of bugs^Wcode in a macro language.
However, I like the idea of making the bootstrap process more of a
"microperl followed by configure probing written as a perl script" rather than
"complex shell scripts followed by miniperl and a few Makefile.PLs", which is
one of the possibilities having perl5 around would offer.
Nicholas Clark