Yes, strongly agree with your point about the impossibility of performing a static parse of Perl. Very annoying. Thankfully, this has been fixed in Raku.

Years ago, I remember being in awe of adamk's tenacity in developing PPI after attending a few early talks at Sydney.pm -- sadly, that heroic effort may have burnt him out, at least he appears to have vanished from the Perl universe. And I almost fell off my chair when I first read about TheDamian's astonishing PPR regex wizardry. :)

See also: Re: Perl script compressor by haukex - which mentions Guacamole.

Guacamole

I think it's noteworthy that the goal of that module is not to be able to parse all of Perl, just the subset of "standard Perl". So for example, it doesn't allow -bareword, stringy eval, unquoted hash keys on the left of the fat comma, and several more, but not because of technical limitations of the parser, but for policy reasons. I've suggested that the technical and policy based restrictions be disentangled to allow for easier porting of codebases to a parseable Perl, but I'm currently not sure when or if that might happen.

Of course also noteworthy is RPerl, which I believe implements its own parser.

unquoted hash keys on the left of the fat comma

That will rule out a lot of the Perl I read and pretty much all of the Perl I write. If that's a policy restriction rather than a technical one then I am at a loss to understand the reasoning behind it.

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