use Perl

On my Parrot days this week I started to add operator support (just + and - to start), but ran into a snag with PGE's operator precedence parser. I expect it's just an undocumented necessary step, so I dropped a note to Patrick and set that aside.

Instead, I made the changes to take advantage of fact that PGE::Text::bracketed now extracts the bracketed value for you. (Thanks Patrick!) And then I started on comma lists. I've got it parsing and transforming to PAST. I'm currently trying to decide what the best way is to handle the transformation to POST. Specifically, I want to transform a Punie statement such as:

print 1, 2;

into the PIR:

print 1
print 2

So internally, I'm splitting a PAST::Op (print) node with a PAST::Op (comma) child into two equal level POST::Op (print) nodes. There are several ways to do it. It's mainly a question of where I want the complexity to bubble up (waterbed theory).

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One interesting little tidbit: because PGE is a recursive descent parser, I can't just directly translate certain rules from the original perl.y. The biggest problem is left recursion:

  rule expr   {
      <PunieGrammar::expr> = <PunieGrammar::expr>
      | <PunieGrammar::expr> \+ <PunieGrammar::expr>
      | ...
      | <PunieGrammar::term>
  }

In a recursive descent parser the left recursion is infinite. One solution is to eliminate the left recursion and translate that to something like:

rule expr {
    <PunieGrammar::term> <PunieGrammar::rexpr>
}

rule rexpr {
    = <PunieGrammar::rexpr>
    | \+ <PunieGrammar::rexpr>
    | ...
    | <null>
}

Unfortunately, this produces a match tree that's less-than-ideal for working out operator precedence. That's why PGE has a built-in operator precedence (shift/reduce) parser.