Dan Sugalski wrote:
>
> int perl6_parse(PerlInterp *interp,
> void *source,
> int flags,
> void *extra_pointer);
Given that other things may want to be streamable in similar fashion (eg
the regular expression engine), why not have a PerlDataSource union or
somesuch that encapsulates all of the possibilities of the final three
arguments? Or put all possibilities into a PerlIO*? That gives direct
support for compressed source, source streamed over a network socket,
etc., with a more common framework than PERL_GENERATED_SOURCE.
Things like PERL_CHAR_SOURCE meaning nul-terminated char* sound
unnecessarily specific.
Also, you gave two options: nul-terminated and length-first. What about
a "chunked" encoding, where you get multiple length-first chunks of the
input (as in HTTP/1.1's Transfer-Encoding: chunked, for one example of
many)? Or are nuls explicitly forbidden in source code?
And, in a related question, the above interface appears that you call
perl6_parse once. Will this be good enough, or do you want to have a
PerlParseState* in/out parameter that allows restarting a parse once you
get more of the input available? (With this, you don't need an explicit
chunked encoding, since the caller can deal with that without being
required to buffer the whole thing in memory before calling
perl6_parse.) Or would that go into the PerlInterp too?
And finally, how do I get the output out of the PerlInterp? Is it stored
under some variable name, or does the PerlInterp start out empty and
gains the parsed syntax tree as its only syntax tree, or ? (The latter
sounds messy if the PerlInterp is also running code, code that wants to
call some standard utility functions implemented in Perl.) Maybe I'm not
making sense.
