At 09:22 PM 8/9/00 -0400, Bryan C. Warnock wrote:
>But.....
>
>It seems to me the generally inability to influence the lexer is the
>one general weakness in Perl.
A weakness shared by pretty much every language I can think of. (Actually I
can't think of one that doesn't have it, but I may be overlooking things)
>Yes, there is many very valid reasons on why this is an evil, evil,
>thing, and I agree with most of them.
Nah, not evil. Major pain in a variety of body parts, but not evil. (That
massive pain is one of the reasons its just not done)
>But, and this may just be the drugs talking here, it seems that the
>bulk of the RFCs deal with one of two issues: how Perl works
>internally, or how the Perl lexer needs to be able to handle something
>new. It makes sense, after all, because if it's not strictly an
>internal problem, and it's not really a lexer issue, than it can most
>likely already be included in the language via a module.
>
>Perl is extremely easy to extend. The Perl lexer is most heinous to
>extend.
Lexers in general are heinous to extend.
>A lot of discussions (and two of my RFCs) are centered around adding a
>pragma to the language to influence the lexer to do this, or do that,
>so that we don't trample on anybody else. Perl will soon have more
>pragmas than keywords, and this makes it unfriendly and inconsistent.
I've not seen a pragma yet that affects lexing, though I may have missed
some. (I don't consider the lexical/package thing a lexer issue, since it's
not) They change the behaviour of the generated code, yes, but not the
lexing/parsing/whatever of the perl source.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
