in reply to A Macro System for Perl?

Doing a macro system for perl could be rather interesting, as its syntax is significantly more complex than lisp's syntax. I can think of a couple of things, though:
  1. Have an inline tag to inline subs. Not, mind, that this will necessarily buy much, as perl's tough to optimize.
  2. Curried functions. No, wait, we're getting those already
  3. Substitutions at the token/AST level. This is trickier, but the regex engine in Perl 6 should be up to it.

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Re: Re: A Macro System for Perl?
by samtregar (Abbot) on May 04, 2002 at 02:11 UTC
    I think #1 could potentially buy you quite a bit. Subroutine overhead in Perl is quite large - lots of stack operations resulting in lots of memory reads and writes. I also think this is probably the one that might be possible in Perl 5. At the core it seems that it would require nothing worse than some really clever op-tree gymnastics...

    I'm not smart enough to understand #2 yet. Someone needs to write the currying section in Learning Perl before I can grok it, perhaps.

    What do you mean by #3? Filter?

    -sam

[reply]
      Well, subroutine calling should be a lot cheaper in perl 6, so there ought not be much difference between starting a new block and starting a subroutine. (That's the plan, at least. Whether we can pull it off is another question entirely)

      As for #3.... the AST that the parser builds up will be accessible in some fashion, so the sort of macro transformation you have in mind could work on that, basically working on your parsed code as a series of symbols rather than as a series of characters, which'd make the transformation conceptually simpler.

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