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Postings from July 2000
Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes: >At 09:51 AM 7/22/00 -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: >>At the conference, Dan suggested that it's imperative that this subset of >>Perl be source-to-source translatable into C. Even pa GCC front-end wouldn't >>work, because we want it to be compatible with other compilers. > >I wasn't adamant that it went to C, so much as it went completely to some >language (rather than language implementation) we could be reasonably sure >was on most people's machines, which sort of means either C or C++. (Though >if someone wants to port BLISS I know where we can get sources... :) > I have not caught up yet either and agree with Dan's other mail part-quoted below - but this "perl in perl" is far from as weird as it seems at first - provided we are only talking about the source form and not using perl as the back end... Chip's pre-C++ mechanism was to use "PI" (Perl Implementation language) Chip then went on to say this is because he "hates embed.pl". Walking away from the Chip's talk Sarathy and I "realized" that while embed.pl is useful perhaps it does not go far enough - rather than reading "something" and spewing a lot of CPP macros, perhaps it should actually massage the C files so CPP did not have to. Combining that idea and "PI" leads to perl-in-perl. I note in passing too that he had immense success in a day-job project by using a pre-processor-in-perl to allow VHDL to be written at a higher level; and also that Tk preprocesses (in perl) the Tcl-ish C code to perl-ish C code >This is *amazingly* true. The single biggest (in fact only, really) reason >there hasn't been much input from most of the folks at the conference is >that, well, we've all been at the conference. ... >Besides, there were real people (and sea >otters!) to see instead) Sea otters are cute! - but it was also good to discuss the implications of perl's guts face to face - we only really sowed "seed corn" in these discussions - you will all see the real details as things proceeed. But I think that it helped to get several of us if not on the "same page" then at least looking on the same library shelf... -- Nick Ing-Simmons (Still in Monterey, and sunburned)