RFC 18 (v2) Immediate subroutines

[Perl6 RFC Librarian]

This and other RFCs are available on the web at
  http://dev.perl.org/rfc/

=head1 TITLE

Immediate subroutines

=head1 VERSION

  Maintainer: Jean-Louis Leroy
  Date: 4 Aug 2000
  Last Modified: 1 Oct 2000
  Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Number: 18
  Version: 2
  Status: Frozen

=head1 ABSTRACT

This very simple construct, inspired by the Forth language,  makes the
parser extensible by Perl code, providing powerful macro capabilities,
multi-line comments, inline functions and conditional compilation.

CHANGES

Made code examples start at column 4 for proper HTML rendering.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

When the parser sees a subroutine that has been marked as 'immediate',
it calls it immediately. The call's arguments are implicitly quoted as
with q{} and the resulting strings are passed to the subroutine. The
entire call is removed from the parse stream and replaced with the
subroutine's return value.

=head1 SYNTAX

use immediate qw( compileif ); # mark subroutines as immediate

=head1 EXAMPLES

    # multiline comments

    sub comment
    {
        return '';
    }

    use immediate 'comment';

    sub foo
    {       
        # ...
        comment {
            this is a multiline comment;
            the call to comment is executed at parse time
            and returns an empty string that replaces
            the whole call in the parse stream };
    }

    # conditional compilation

    sub compileif
    {
        my ($condition, $body) = @_;
        return eval($condition) ? $body : '';
    }

    use immediate qw( compileif ); # mark subroutines as immediate

    sub bar
    {
        compileif -e 'state'
            {
            do 'state';
            }

        compileif $Module::VERSION > 1.23,
            {
            # blah blah blah
            }
    }

    # macros

    sub square
    {
        my $arg = shift;
        my $gensym = $arg . '_';
        $gensym .= '_' while $arg =~ /$gensym/;
        return "do { $gensym = $arg; $gensym * $gensym }";
    }

=head1 IMPLEMENTATION

A flag is associated with the data structure associated to a
subroutine by the parser. The pragmatic module 'immediate' is used to
turn the flag on. When the parser recognizes a subroutine call, it
checks the flag and if it's true, proceeds as described above.

=head1 REFERENCES

The Forth standard.

"Starting Forth", by Leo Brodie