At 09:50 PM 9/12/00 +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
>On Tue, Sep 12, 2000 at 04:55:02PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > > Are there any better reasons than "It would be nice?"
> > It'd make things easier? (I'd rather write a parser in perl than C...)
>
>You're going to have to do it some time, for bootstrapping. And now you need
>an interpreter on hand at the compiling stage. Ugh. But, yes, it would make
>things a lot easier to write. Whether or not that's the Right Thing is, of
>course, a completely separate issue.
Oh, sure, the core lexer and parser will be in whatever implementation
language we end up with. That doesn't mean we can't let it be extended, or
even end up writing most of the funkier bits in perl. (Though that does
mean we'll need some sort of way to call perl subs like C functions, and
I'm not sure how we'll do that at the moment)
> > I think wedges into the parser/lexer (heck, all of the perl interpreter's
> > pieces) are in order, though we might not want to write the lower-level
> > bits in perl.
>
>Yes, yes, and yes. This is an extension of what we have with %^H, only on a
>much, much grander scale. You still need an interpreter on hand when you're
>compiling, but more introspection is always a good idea.
>
>Ooh, um, what happens when someone reaches in and modifies the parser and
>so that it can't parse itself any more? Aargh.
We let them? If someone wants to kill their own perl, that's OK with me.
(Heck, we don't stop people from pulling perl into emacs and going at the
binary, so why stop this?)
Granted if *we* do it (this being the p6 development community we here)
then it means we get to revert back a change or six in the repository and
smack someone about the head and shoulders some. :)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
