I've decided to pull out the old perl parser I've been working on from time to time, and have another go at it. The last attept stalled after much thought on WHAT exactly to call it, since it wasn't promising to parse perfectly, and we all know you can't REALLY 'parse' without a running perl interpretor. So after 6 months of stewing over it's purpose, I've come to this decision.
Parse::Perl::Isolated is a module for parsing an isolated perl document. Perl source code can be parsed WITHOUT the need to have a running perl interpreter, WITHOUT having to first parse the module we 'use'. In exchange for this advance, we have to take a few set-backs. Firstly, it won't parse super strange grammer messing around with stuff, as achieved with code filters. Second, it doesn't try to tell what is a function, or an argument, etc. It tokenises, and lexes down to individual statements, but will avoid working out function arguments and really curly stuff. Also, it will try to parse to the 'most commonly used' style of perl programming. That is, if it can successfully understand everything in CPAN outside of Acme::, it is considered complete and successfull.. People that do ultra-weird things in their code may find it doesn't work perfectly. HOWEVER, taking Parse::Perl::Isolated does leave me with a few problems. Because there is quite an amount of stuff in it already ( tokenizer, lever, document object stuff, HTML formatters, analyser, obfuscater, tidyer etc ) I end up virtually giving myself RSI by typing class names like Parse::Perl::Isolated::Tokenizer::Quote::Simple or Parse::Perl::Isolated::Format::HTML::Komodo. What I'd LIKE to do, is to put the actual code in PPI::, with the option to load it as either use PPI or use Parse::Perl::Isolate ( which would be simply a load and documentation ). Is this not acceptable to some people? Does anyone have issues with using a root namespace for a large body of code. ( I see things like POE, DBI, LWP etc ). As a blatant promo on it's current state, I've cleaned up an old demo script that basically implements ::HTML::Format from the Tokenizer only ( so it has some issues with function names ). It's available at http://ali.as/cgi-bin/CPAN/applications/psp/psp.pl If I don't get any feedback, I'm going to assume that nobody has a serious enough problem, and I'll go ahead with PPI. Adam
