In the sense I think you might mean, nothing should be done. I use Perl 5, I like Perl 5. I don't see a need to regard static unparsability as a problem and "solve" it. Larry apparently is going to static parsability in Perl 6. I don't have a firm opinion about whether that is bad or good. I do think that it's proved wise in the past to listen to Larry in these matters.

The reason for a proof is there had been considerable question about whether Perl 5 was statically unparsable just for practical purposes, or just given present parsing techniques. Adam Kennedy's PPI man page says that the module name Parse::Perl had been reserved in case someone invented a way to statically parse Perl. Opinion shifted to the point where the most people felt certain that no static parser for Perl existed. But I think it's nice to get the issue completely nailed down.

Lack of static parsability is an obstacle for many utilities that deal with Perl 5 code. That's definitely a downside. But it's not the whole equation, and the ability to do Turing-equivalent fiddling at BEGIN time is an upside.

In reply to Re^2: Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof by Jeffrey Kegler
in thread Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof by Jeffrey Kegler

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.