I have been a little bored recently so I have been looking around the monastery and came across the node
it talks about the fact that to compile perl you would need to embed a perl interpreter into the final binary (sounds v nasty ;-) I read
explains how damn hard it is to parse perl, so I can see that creating compiled that could parse perl would be very very hard, however my question is why an interpretor... Historically that is, are there strong advantages to creating an interpretted language over a compiled one. I am still not really sure I understand why a compiler for perl would be such a bad idea. What aspects of the language could not be supported by a compiler?