Perl is by no means context-free. Many Perl constructs depend on the surrounding elements of the language to inform them what to produce. The most obvious example is the dual behavior of arrays in list vs. scalar context.

Perl6 is apparently planned to have a formal top-down definition, but Perl5 and its ancestors evolved through natural selection in a sequence of visions, wishes, experiments and mistakes. The result is astonishingly robust and handy.

That said, Perl5 does have a grammar. You may be interested to look at perly.y and toke.c in the perl source tree.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: original definition vs final language by Zaxo
in thread original definition vs final language by dystrophy

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