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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Not strictly related, but: "Ruby 1.8.6 and Python 2.5 are both first-class languages for Mac development [apple.com]".
    • I really don't understand why Apple don't list perl there too. Camelbones will support the scripting bridges stuff too, so it'll be just as "first class" as the others.

      Plus Camelbones has an awesome example app [sergeant.org].

      • I see you're the author of the awesome example app, heh.

        (I don't really even know what Camelbones is, but) I was wondering if you use Algorithm::BinPack [cpan.org] for that. Your kind of application is even mentioned in the synopsis (s/CD/DVD/) of that module.

        • I don't, because it would put things on the discs out of order, and I don't want that.
      • Well, it might or might not yet be a "first class citizen [mail-archive.com]" (which I mean to take "ships with the development tools"). However, you're right; unlike Leon's examples, there is a Cocoa bridge. I put that down to the fact that Sherm Pendley's worked for years on CamelBones with little or no reward, but at least some encouragement.

        I suspect the answer to Leon's original question is a combination of "nobody wants to do it", "nobody wants it" and "the Perl world is too insular".
        • Sigh, that reply to Leon's question doesn't make sense; let's try again. "Where's Perl?" "Nowhere, because either nobody wants it, nobody wants to do it, or the Perl world is too insular and nobody noticed anyone else doing it."
        • Nobody develops for Perl anymore, CPAN is too crowded.
    • Why? I'll tell you why.

      Because Perl is resistant to being processed by development tools.

      Plain and simple.

      This is the same reason that Google goes for Java and Python mainly, because you can write huge toolchains around it.

      Perl is impossible to parse.
      • What makes Perl impossible to parse (note: compared to Python)?

      • Is it true that a subset of Perl that eliminates string eval and a couple of other features is parseable? What's happened to efforts based on that?

        I'm running on low sleep, and there's probably an answer to this, and I should probably know it, but I'd like a refresher for my poor brain. :)

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

        • I think such a subset is conceivable, but it won’t be of much practical interest, as it must necessarily exclude BEGIN as well as assignment to globs, which effectively means no use.

      • Perl is impossible to parse.
        No longer so. Take a look at PPI [cpan.org], which is a programmatic way to parse and manipulate Perl code without perl. But I agree it probably came too late (2002? 2003?).

        • Take a look at PPI [cpan.org]

          You know you are talking to the author of PPI, right?

        • PPI is a programmatic way to parse and manipulate Perl documents.

          It is NOT a way to parse and manipulate Perl code.

          I know you probably didn't mean to say it in those terms, but the distinction between code and document is extremely important in this case.

          This is why providing method name tab-complete, probably the most obvious of all editor assistance functions, is incredibly difficult to do in Perl.

          Even after PPI came out, it took a long time for people to realise that "syntax parser" was not necesarily go
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