The OP has convincingly proving that it is undecidable to determine the prototype of a given sub in a given piece of code. The choice of problem is because (now this is an appeal to intuition, not a formal statement) however you define "parsing", determining the prototype of a sub is something that by all sensibilities should result from "parsing". (Update: the prototype of a sub can also be made to affect whether a "/" is interpreted by the compiler as a division operator or the start of a regex match). Elsewhere I listed the example of determining whether a module loads successfully or not (i.e., whether the module returns a true value) as another thing you might imagine as being an outcome of "parsing".
So I can see where the OP is coming from, but of course it is a bit moot if you reject the artificial distinction between parsing and execution in a language like Perl, which allows arbitrary execution to be freely mixed with "parsing" phases. When you rephrase it more realistically as (for instance) "the BEGIN phase of Perl is Turing-complete", the whole exercise is trivial and loses much of its shock value.
blokhead
In reply to Re^4: Unparseability is A Good Thing
by blokhead
in thread Unparseability is A Good Thing
by Jeffrey Kegler
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