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Re: Backtracking through the source

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From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
November 29, 2000 12:34
Subject:
Re: Backtracking through the source
Message ID:
5.0.1.4.0.20001129152529.02448a00@24.8.96.48
At 01:38 PM 11/29/00 +0000, David Grove wrote:
>That's basically where I've been talking about a "creole processor", which
>would in these terms be a pre-preprocessor, I imagine. This was also my
>original source of confusion, since I thought that this was the primary
>goal of the "pre-processor". What I've worked on is something that takes
>in "creoles" or modes of perl or "little-language stuff" and turns it into
>pure perl before actual interpretation.

Then what you've got there is a source filter, and it's not something the 
parser necessarily needs to deal with except on the most general of terms.

Good integration with source filters may well solve a large chunk of our 
little language problem. They're a pain and a half to write now but if we 
can get them easier to write that'd be a good thing. ('Specially if we can 
manage to provide a set of tweakable filters--perhaps one Forth-ish, one 
LISP-ish, and maybe one APL-ish for the UTF-8 enabled crowd...)

No matter what we do, the core parser is not going to be a pleasant place 
to muck around in for the average, sane individual. It might be that it's 
not worth going insane making it configurable if we can handle 90% of the 
cases with source filtering that have some hooks into the parser so they 
can pass in hints and suchlike things.


					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk


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