Contrary to some other languages (e.g. shell, TCL, awk, makefile), Perl has clearly a compile phase and a run time phase. Whether the compile phase produces an op tree or an executable file has become to a large extent irrelevant in my view. But, yes, it's not really a compilation in the sense of what you do with a C program, you don't produce a binary executable program.

> Contrary to some other languages (e.g. shell, TCL , awk,

That's not up to date:

Since version 8.4, Tcl has featured the ability to automatically translate scripts into bytecode where feasible

from http://wiki.tcl.tk/38633

It's interesting to note that one of the main arguments why TCL lost against competitors like Perl was the bad performance.

Also what they call "bytecode" here seems to be high level opcode.

That's all not very new stuff, I'm pretty sure many BASIC dialects in the 80s already "tokenized" the source in a "parsing" phase.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

> many BASIC dialects in the 80s already "tokenized" the source in a "parsing" phase.

On Commodore 116/16 and 64, you could even program directly in the tokens. ? was print , most others were just abbreviations like fO instead of for or oP instead of open . And when you byte-dumped the memory containing the program, it contained these instead of all the commands.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
[download]

Interesting ++. I did not know that, thank you for the information.

I don't think we have any real disagreement except for terminology. A compiler translates one formal language to another. If you define the parse tree to be a language, your definition of "language" is loose enough that every data structure is a language, and that makes every program a compiler. Saying that a language is "compiled" in the old-school sense really means that it is "compiled to machine language," but as you say, the distinction is mostly unimportant these days.

Contrary to some other languages (e.g. shell, TCL, awk, makefile), Perl has clearly a compile phase and a run time phase.

All of those languages have to be parsed, so they clearly have a "parse phase." The thing about Perl is that it lets you execute Perl code during the parse. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any other language that lets you do that.

> The thing about Perl is that it lets you execute Perl code during the parse.

What do you mean?

Macros are executed during the parse and LISP is one of the two oldest higher order languages and often copied.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}