use Perl

• reusable toolchain? (Score:1)

  by nothingmuch (5848)

  You are working under the assumption that you won't be able to reuse the existing toolchain to write these tools.
  
  The approach that everyone seem to be aiming for is that instead of writing PPI all over again for Perl 6, you are supposed to get decent enough support form the actual grammar that ships with the compiler in order to do your own interesting things with it.
  
  Secondly, since Perl 6 supports separate compilation units in many ways this is actually much simpler than Perl 5 - there is no more possibili
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by rjbs (4671)

    in the absense of any BEGIN { } declarations or importing of macros/grammars from other compilation units (this is something you can statically check for if the unit is already compiled)

    
    
    I am probably being thick, but once they code is compiled, haven't you already run the BEGIN block and all its arbitrary contents?

    --
    rjbs
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nothingmuch (5848)

      The begin block itself has to be fully parsed before it's run.
      
      Similarly a macro or grammar extension coming from another compilation unit has already been compiled.
      
      At this point you can examine their code in a manner much like Safe does (existing problems in safe are an implementation issue, not a conceptual one), and run the code with some resource limitation if necessary (if this wasn't possible then we wouldn't have javascript ;-)
      
      Furthermore, if you deduced by static analysis that these blocks cannot aff
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Alias (5735)

        > At this point you can examine their code in a manner much like Safe does (existing problems in safe are an implementation issue, not a conceptual one), and run the code with some resource limitation if necessary (if this wasn't possible then we wouldn't have javascript ;-)
        
        You don't need to run Javascript in order to parse it, since it has (I think) a static syntax.
        
        Also, this comes down to practicality.
        
        "What percentage of CPAN can this parsing strategy handle?"
        
        As a context-free document parser, PPI can
        • Re:reusable toolchain? (Score:1)

          by nothingmuch (5848) on 2008.01.29 18:31 (#60660) Homepage Journal

          With respect to dependencies that will indeed fail to work, but for use Foo that's untrue - Perl 6's importing semantics will support real linkage of symbols for the benefit of compilation units. The method 'import' and glob assignments are not supposed to be the only way to actually import symbols anymore. This solves a lot of issues.
          
          As for reading files etc in BEGIN - that's also handled differently - there is no guarantee that a BEGIN block will run every single time you run the program, it is fair game to save the output as constants in the compilation unit. Reading configuration files is supposed to happen at INIT/CHECK, and before you whip out the "no that's broken" argument, it's supposed to be fixed in perl 6.
          
          Please do a little more research before you post all this FUD, people have thought of these "horrible problems" before.

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