At 02:03 PM 8/22/2001 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
Dan Sugalski wrote:
...
Perl 5 to perl 6 isn't that tough though (we do chunks of Python and Ruby to perl 5, after all), and we do have a full-featured perl 5 parser handy.
You guys are really focused on the syntax, but to me, the difficult things to handle are subtle *semantic* changes. That's why I said in another message that a two-interpreter system might be the easiest route.
Well, as I've had some Python (and Java) folks happily point out, perl doesn't have any well-defined semantics anyway. :) Seriously, we've a reasonably comprehensive test suite now with perl 5, and a very large code base with expected behavior to draw on to test the conversion. Much of the perl 5->perl 6 transition is strictly syntactic. It's possible that some of perl 5's undefined edge behaviour won't translate, but that'll only be because Larry's decided not to make it translate. Anything else is a bug, and one to be squashed. (We're not losing turing-completeness--perfect execution of past behaviour isn't unattainable) This isn't, after all, the first, or second, or even third time we've done this. The version number's 6 for a reason... Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk