At 01:38 PM 11/29/00 +0000, David Grove wrote:
>That's basically where I've been talking about a "creole processor", which
>would in these terms be a pre-preprocessor, I imagine. This was also my
>original source of confusion, since I thought that this was the primary
>goal of the "pre-processor". What I've worked on is something that takes
>in "creoles" or modes of perl or "little-language stuff" and turns it into
>pure perl before actual interpretation.
Then what you've got there is a source filter, and it's not something the
parser necessarily needs to deal with except on the most general of terms.
Good integration with source filters may well solve a large chunk of our
little language problem. They're a pain and a half to write now but if we
can get them easier to write that'd be a good thing. ('Specially if we can
manage to provide a set of tweakable filters--perhaps one Forth-ish, one
LISP-ish, and maybe one APL-ish for the UTF-8 enabled crowd...)
No matter what we do, the core parser is not going to be a pleasant place
to muck around in for the average, sane individual. It might be that it's
not worth going insane making it configurable if we can handle 90% of the
cases with source filtering that have some hooks into the parser so they
can pass in hints and suchlike things.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
