Front page | perl.bootstrap |
Postings from July 2000
Horos <horos@earth.he.net> writes: >> >Sure, >> >it might make _p_erl faster and leaner, >> >> Actually it probably would not make that much difference to '_p_erl'. >> > >How about in the designing/creation of a compiler? >How about in creation of >IDEs with syntax coloring && intellisense types of things? Some may not care >for them, but large groups of people do... Which would all benefit from having a formal grammar - but the question was how it would affect 'perl' (the program) - and my answer was "not much". > >Ok, I guess my concern is being able to embed perl inside of other applications, >and the memory cost of doing so. ( ie: the scalability problem ). The grammar constructs that are allowed have little impact on that - it is the code behind the operators etc. that costs. > >And yet ANOTHER concern is the existence of various holdovers from perl4, stuff >like getservbyname which really has no right to be in the core proper. >( ie: the legacy problem ). Right - that is what is different about perl6 - Larry has said we can rationalize those this time where he did not allow himself to do that with perl5. > >And, on the other side of the coin, another concern about perl5-porters >was the inability to add stuff to the core without going through a huge tug of >war. ( ie: the immutability problem ) Right again - so this time we try even harder to make modular additions possible - perl5 made a major jump in this direction but there is scope for more. > >And finally, the fact that perl didn't natively support certain protocols >(http comes to mind) and needed external programs to bootstrap itself (lynx, >ftp, etc inside of CPAN) ( ie: the portability problem ). Which is the inverse of the above - on the one hand the "core" should not have getservbyname() let alone HTTP/FTP "built in" - on the other the "distribution" should be self contained. > >I think we need a method to make perl both really small and large at the same >time. I'm open to suggestions, but I think that being big and monolithic >has a lot of drawbacks if perl is to spread.. Linux does it right, I think, by >allowing modules to be imported/exported from the kernel at will. Which is what all the "in the core" debates were about - do it as a module not in the core. Then we have debates about which modules are bundled. -- Nick Ing-Simmons