Re: What will the Perl6 code name be?

[Simon Cozens]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 04:38:12PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> The one thing that just occurred to me is that we're going to need to 
> support multiple interpreter targets simultaneously. Having the back-end 
> emit C source isn't going to get those BEGIN blocks very far. :(

Don't forget that those BEGIN blocks are *supposed* to be instructions
to the compiler.

> Runtime string eval, do, and require are a serious pain in the butt. 
> They're the one set of things that'll force a real interpreter into a program.

*nodnod*. This is really tricky; if there's no eval in the program, we can
make all sorts of interesting optimizations: forego the whole SV process, and
just use ints and char*s and whatever. If there's an eval, you've got to throw
everything back into Perl-space, embed an interpreter, and all that jazz. Yes,
it sucks hard. But Perl *is* an interpreted language, like it or not.

-- 
"Jesus ate my mouse" or some similar banality.
        -- Megahal (trained on asr), 1998-11-06