Perl 6 Grammars – not only for parsing • Hacker News Board

Re: Perl 6 Grammars – not only for parsing

#11

Post by whiskeyjack » Wed, Nov 24, 2010, 3:31 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #9

python_padawan wrote: post #5

Congratulations, Perl 6 developers. You are beginning to catch up with Django. (See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial03/ if you think I'm being sarcastic.) Once upon a time, Perl was the de facto language for web development. Then there was a bit of falling out between the web-centric folks and the server-centric folks; resulting in PHP. Perl, as a language for web-development, never really recovere…

PHP was its own, independent effort. It doesn't really have anything to do with Perl. People migrated to it because it was easier to deploy (just put it on the web server), and probably easier to write for many people.

PHP was originally a layer over Perl. It's in the first paragraph of the history.

It doesn't NOW have anything to do with Perl... but it's pretty easy to see some of that history in the code.

Re: Perl 6 Grammars – not only for parsing

#12

Post by davidw » Wed, Nov 24, 2010, 3:40 PM UTC

whiskeyjack wrote: post #11

davidw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP was its own, independent effort. It doesn't really have anything to do with Perl. People migrated to it because it was easier to deploy (just put it on the web server), and probably easier to write for many people.

PHP was originally a layer over Perl. It's in the first paragraph of the history. It doesn't NOW have anything to do with Perl... but it's pretty easy to see some of that history in the code.

The post I was responding too makes it sound like PHP was some sort of fork of Perl, which is most certainly not the case.

You're right of course that there are some things that were borrowed.

Re: Perl 6 Grammars – not only for parsing

#13

Post by chromatic » Wed, Nov 24, 2010, 7:10 PM UTC

cookietime wrote: post #10

chromatic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume I'm barely competent at both Perl and Python. Can you explain how looping over repeated regular expressions is more powerful and useful than core language support for grammars and arbitrary tree transformations? (I approve of Python's named captures, though even Perl 5 has had those for almost three years now.) ... over a decade and a half-hearted attempt at rewriting the language... In truth, the Perl 6 redes…

Perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where grammars and arbitrary tree transformations are more useful than looping over repeated regular expressions? If you want others to see the utility of these Perl 6 features, they're going to need side-by-side syntax-highlighted clear-as-day examples. Otherwise it's just, "must be some weird Perl 6 feature -- the way I'm doing it in blub works fine for me".

Perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where grammars and arbitrary tree transformations are more useful than looping over repeated regular expressions?

Any parsing operation which needs to keep in mind state.

Re: Perl 6 Grammars – not only for parsing

#14

Post by cookietime » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 7:12 AM UTC

chromatic wrote: post #13

cookietime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where grammars and arbitrary tree transformations are more useful than looping over repeated regular expressions? If you want others to see the utility of these Perl 6 features, they're going to need side-by-side syntax-highlighted clear-as-day examples. Otherwise it's just, "must be some weird Perl 6 feature -- the way I'm doing it in blub works fine for me".

Perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where grammars and arbitrary tree transformations are more useful than looping over repeated regular expressions? Any parsing operation which needs to keep in mind state.

That sounds like a good brief description of an example, but like I said, for people to get that "a ha" moment, it's got to be written up so it can be presented right there in front of them.

My current language is already fairly useful for "Any parsing operation which needs to keep in mind state" ... if you want users to look at Perl 6, then it's going to take concrete written-out examples. No in-jokes or historical anecdotes; just actually show how Perl 6 does it better. Over and over, until it sinks in.

People who don't already know Perl 6 are not going to just take your word for it. They need to be shown easy-to-follow examples of Perl 6 solving problems that are more difficult to solve in their current language.