Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!europa.asd.contel.com!gatech!psuvax1!news From: flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: Ruminations on the future of Perl Message-ID: <2gaH&?b#@cs.psu.edu> Date: 28 Jun 91 20:53:38 GMT References: Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State Computer Science Lines: 19 Nntp-Posting-Host: dictionopolis.cs.psu.edu Perhaps I should clarify. What I have is pieces of a Perl parser. Once that's done, the obvious next step is a semantic analysis and optimization phase. And then a code generator can generate whatever sort of back-end code you like: assembler, C, Scheme, whatever. Scheme seems to me to have several advantages over C. If this ever gets that far and I do decide that Scheme would work well, there will probably be a Scheme compiler and interpreter bundled in. One of my friends has been wishing for a lightweight Scheme that can occupy the same niche as Perl and C as a systems programming tool. If you're unfamiliar with Scheme, the language is somewhat a descendent of Algol and Lisp. The lispy syntax will probably turn off anyone who doesn't like lispy parentheses, but it's pretty trivial to paste a different syntax in front. Existing Scheme compilers generate code comparable in speed to C compilers; heavily recursive code is usually faster in Scheme. -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu