Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news From: flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: Ruminations on the future of Perl Message-ID: Date: 28 Jun 91 00:00:25 GMT References: Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State Computer Science Lines: 21 Nntp-Posting-Host: dictionopolis.cs.psu.edu >Probably the best thing for the long-run health of Perl (although the >worst for everybody now involved with it) is to scrap it and redesign >(and reimplement) it from the ground up. I started to reimplement (but not redesign) Perl a while back. My intent was to create a stand-alone parser (and scanner) that would read a Perl program and output a syntax tree in lispy form. If you then take the syntax tree and do a huge amount of semantic analysis, you can output, say, Scheme code. Then you just need to implement a Scheme engine with enough libraries to support Perl builtins. Once you have a Scheme suitable for Perl-type programming tasks, you can easily create a more politically correct syntax. And then you can automatically convert Perl to the new syntax by way of the Perl to Scheme translator. I halfway implemented the parser before the project dropped by the wayside. Do people care enough about Perl that it would be worth pursuing again? -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu