just a few musings on bootstrapping the grammar. someone mentioned the idea of using Perl6::Rules to help with this and i think that could be a great way to go for several reasons. it will take a fair amount of time to get a new p6 rules engine (fearless leader said 1 month but i think that is aggressive). also writing up and testing parts of the grammar will take time too. we could split off parts of the compiler to be done in parallel with p6:r.
first off, i propose we design the grammar for parsing perl6 to use a subset of the full rules chosen to match the features of p6:r. then we can start with defining grammar rules for p6 and doing tests for them (table driven of course). these will be run under p6:r but will be converted to test the new p6 rules engine as well (with hopefully little modification needed). working rules can be put together into grammars which can be used to generate prototype AST stuff. we can even bootstrap the code generation phase by using this AST and writing p5 (or PIR!) code to generate PIR. this could be done as a separate process/pass so the process can be done in p5 or PIR. the main reasons for these ideas is to allow more people to attack the project at the same time and as early as possible. i smell^Wsense a large groundswell of pent up energy for the p6 compiler so this could be a way to utilize all of it. that newbie volunteer could work on a rule test scaffold and with others start adding needed p6 grammar parts to it for testing. others can use that work and generate AST and/or PIR. this is how we ported a PL/I compiler from a prime (via 9 track tapes and a vax intermediary) to a power6 (not the current ibm chips :) over 20 years ago. we worked on cross compilation first (same as using p5 to code generate PIR) and the compiler code itself (the grammar in p6) used many fewer ops than the language supported and it skipped normal i/o and used a custom simple i/o lib. we do the same by not using all possible grammar features in the p6 grammar (we can change/optimize that once we are bootstrapped) and by using p5 and p6:r as crosscompilation tools. uri -- Uri Guttman ------ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs ---------------------------- http://jobs.perl.org
