Sam Vilain writes: : On Wed, 7 Nov 2001 12:26:31 +0000 : Sam Vilain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: : : > Why limit Perl to OO and procedural programming at its core? : : I just realised my mistake after looking at the hyperoperator discussion: : Hyperoperators bring functional programming to Perl, with all of the mad : but inspired programming nuttiness that comes with functional programmers.
I don't think hyperoperators have much to do with functional programming. Funtional programming has more to do with closures, which we already have, and writing code without side effects, which we can already do. Hyperoperators and curried parameters are mostly just syntactic relief. : So if functional programming can be in Perl 6, why not rules based : programming? Perl already supports a limited form of rules-based programming within regular expressions. General rule-based programming depends on backtracking through ordinary code, which, as I mentioned in A3, has interesting implications with regard to scoping, which might be resolved if we allow continuations. But yacc is a different sort of beast, in that it is analyzing a static set of rules to produce a one-pass LALR(1) algorithm without backtracking. As such, it's just a convenient data structure that gets turned into a different internal data structure that gets interpreted. Something like that can be done with the operator definition capability we'll have in Perl 6. It's still possible we'll end up with a yacc approach for parsing Perl 6, but I expect rather that the backtracking rules of regular expressions will suffice to parse, as long as we can tie various regexes together into a system that allows for the creation of recursive data structures. The real trick will be integrating operator precedence without excessive recursion. Larry
