My Own Fun with Perl

Fun with perl? I hope you don't mind if I get up on the stage for a minute
to sell my wares of what was fun for me.

First up, there's NoMoreBraces (renamed from BraceBeGone), that lets you
code Perl with all the benefits and problems with Python's whitespace
compiler. I mentioned this on fwp before, but it was deep in a thread, and
probably ignored. I apologize if you don't find whitespace-sensitivity to
be fun.

I'm not sure if I should submit this under the Acme namespace, or as a
legit package (good package names wanted, privately).

http://www.perl.com/braces/

But wait, theres' more! I've also got a feature-ful Perl Regex Debugger
implemented, in pure perl, based off some old protype code from mjd. I
don't know exactly how mjd's current debugger compares to mine, but mine
does have the benefit of both a command-line and tk-based interface.

http://www.perl.com/rebug/

And coming soon...a regex compiler! Compile down regexes from their
perl-interpreted based environment to native C code under the hood. While
there is little benefit on simple regexes /abc/, there can be an order of
magnitude improvement as the regexes get more complex. For now, I've only
implemented character classes, anchors and the various quantifiers
working. But hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to implement the various
others. (I think lexically scoped variable access from within (?{}) will
be impossible, unless I have perl6's getcallernamespace). More info on
this to come soon.

I have yet to figure out if anyone uses complicated regexes enough that
something like this would be useful. But I still think it's fun,
regardless of practical benefits.

Fun? You decide. Please let me know privately if you think this is
horribly-unfun and that I should stay away from this stage.

You can now have the stage back.

Mike Lambert

• My Own Fun with Perl by Michel J Lambert
• Re: My Own Fun with Perl by Michel J Lambert
• Re: My Own Fun with Perl by Bart Lateur
• Re: My Own Fun with Perl by Dmitry Kohmanyuk
• Re: My Own Fun with Perl by ianb