Fellow mr mischief
I've never ever used Parse::RecDescent before. It worth the effort? The documentation is pretty big, seems that its a big and complex module. Except by some more regular expressions spread through the code, I'm basically using this as my "parser" (sorry about the portuguese comments, I can translate them on demand):

I would love to read what the fellow monks think about this code, and if someone have any nice way to improve it. Thank you all for the answers and considerations, and may the gods bless you.

If your program, with the chances suggested before, works for all cases and will never or very seldom need to be changed, then it's probably not worth pulling out a big powerful tool like a parser generator module.

If it's likely to change much, even a little at a time, then eventually you'd have saved more and more work in the end by moving to using one. It's all a matter of cost versus benefits.

If everything works and never needs to be changed, then the cost of rewriting the code to use another tool is wasted effort with no real up-front benefit. If someone needs to maintain it, then the costs add up over time either way and the benefits of having a cleaner implementation become more pronounced.

BTW, I've had enough French and Spanish and your comments are written clearly enough that I get a good understanding of them, although I wouldn't be able to rewrite them en Portugues. Yet another example of why clear comments are helpful -- non-native readers have a massively better chance of making sense of them.



Christopher E. Stith

As a Londoner Bad Guy would say: "in pieces".

• My program don't works for all the cases. I don't know all the cases yet. This depends on the sales folks, they're allways thinking on something new. Chances are that this would never end.
• I'm just moving out from a substr() version that is a maintenance nightmare. Maybe should I wait one or two months before trying to learn something new to improve the program again?
• I agree with you when you say "If everything works and never needs to be changed(...)"
• So the comments wasn't a total waste at all, even considering that I will rewrite all this code soon or later. Thank you very much for the effort of trying to understand them.

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