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chromatic (983)
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Minor Irony
I hate writing parsers, but much of the work Allison's asked me to do to revise the PMCs in Parrot has required modification and extension of a parser written in Perl 5 to turn our little language for describing PMCs into compilable C code.
The other day I realized that I could take 65 lines of generated code and turn it into 1 line of generated code by smartening the parser and re-using a function we already had elsewhere. It works for built-in PMCs, but I think there may be a failure case for dynamic PMCs (though fixing that is fairly easy and will provide a nice speed improvement there too).
After thinking about the problem for a while, I decomposed the problem into a couple of function calls that transformed the data I had into the data I needed. I didn't actually write the functions; I merely wrote their names, passed in their arguments, and received the data they returned. After dinner, I started writing the functions.
Everything went well, until I realized that I had to keep looking back and forth at the functions and de-facto signatures (this is Perl 5 code) to remember what I passed in and what I received.
Score one for explicit signatures like you find in C.
--Felix Lee
Madness.
--Larry Wall
blink (Score:1)
Wow, next you'll be applauding static typing? ;)
Re: (Score:1)
Even only the names of the returned values would have been sufficient.
Re: (Score:2)
@JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
print reverse @JAPH;