Re: Now, to try again...

At 12:29 PM 12/18/00 +0000, David Grove wrote:

>Sam Tregar <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>  > On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, David Grove wrote:
>  >
>
>[snip]
>
>  > > _Perl_ _within_ _a_ _Perl_ _context_ _and_ _for_ _Perl_ _purposes_,
>  >
>  > Feeling a little hostile to the rest of the programming world?  You're
>  > sounding almost nationalistic!  We're not at war.
>
>No no. I just think we've redefined the "little languages" as everests
>rather than molehills. That scares me.

Luckily, Dave, this is a matter of perception on your part. :) Not that the 
concern's not worth having, just that I don't think it's going to be an issue.

>I also admit that I would, on a purely personal-bias level, prefer not to
>cast too much support in the direction of Python, Java, C#, or ASP at the
>moment. A bit of stolen grammar, perhaps, but not support for the
>languages outside of a pure perl context. We have a bit of ground to
>recover. I've mixed feelings whether this effort can help or harm that. It
>depends on marketing, of course. That's probably something that I just
>have to work through, since I know we want that.

I don't really care if we parse any other language. (Though the hooks 
should be in place to do so if someone wants to put the work forth to do 
it) Emitting Java bytecode and .NET stuff's one of the design goals, but 
that's for a different place.

It does mean we want to have some method of specifying access to external 
libraries--Java without AWT (or whatever they're using at the moment) 
wouldn't be all that much fun.

>But that's in context,
>because that's what it sounds like we're reaching for: the ability to
>parse anything to perl, whether it actually translates or not, using
>methods that seem out of scope. We also want to produce the output of run
>| binary | bytecode, meaning python in, .class (java) out.

Right, but the output is separate from the input. There will be modules to 
take perl bytecode and emit .NET and java bytecode. Where the perl bytecode 
came from is pretty much irrelevant.

>I think this _should_ be a simple thing, or as recently suggested a simple
>set of things. We don't appear to be going in that direction.

It can't be that simple. Not the nature of the beast--there is some 
complexity involved.

>I have long since seen the "little languages" as altering Perl's syntax.

Not a view shared by other people. Which is good, because it doesn't, really.

>Parsing C
>into Perl or Perl source trees doesn't compute into that and it's just
>blowing my mind.
>
>Maybe it is simple. If it is, no problem.

I think at the moment you just have to take it on faith that it'll work. 
(And it will) Perhaps once things come into clearer focus they'll gel for you.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
[email protected]                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk