At 06:58 PM 9/15/00 +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 12:53:29PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > The only reason I can see nice winning over fast is if nice brings in
> whole
> > new concepts to the language. (Like, say, matrix ops or Damian's
> currying > > stuff)
>
>Well, taking the idea of writing the parser in Perl, let's have a look
>at how practical it actually is.
>
>We need to be able to parse that Perl, so we do have a bootstrapping problem.
>We have a number of choices, and I've only just seen the third and I like it.
>A lot.
I'm snipping #s 1 & 2, since they're really not feasable.
>3) Think emacs. Write a "safe" parser in C, which gets linked into miniperl.
>That reads in the complete Perl parser and spits out bytecode. The bytecode
>gets read by perl6. You have the option of using it to create a modified
>version of itself. OK, you're writing an entire Perl parser in C, but you've
>still got the flexibility of a Perl version. Hmm. Nice. And bytecode will be
>fast, won't it?
This, or a modification of this, would work rather nicely. I'd rather the
core perl parser still be written in C, with any add-on bits written in
either C or perl. (Or Fortran or COBOL, if someone wants to do 'em
locally--I don't much care)
It's likely that some of the more esoteric bits of perl 6's parser (and
perl 6 itself) will be written in perl and later (maybe) migrated to C.
> > That, I think, is a bit of excessive pessimism, though I'm rather glad
> it's
> > here.
>
>Dan, any time you want me to be a miserable, pessimistic bastard, just shout.
>How are we doing on deadlines, again?
I think we've made all the ones we should, though I still need to get the
RFCs together by list-end deadline. I think, though, that the internals
RFCs need about another two to four weeks past the language RFC/spec
deadline, since what Larry decides will have a strong impact on what we can
and need to do.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
