But I suspect that perls "Do what I mean" combined with highly optimized code left the perl parser far removed from theory.
It is my understanding that the scary part isn't in the parsing - Perl is parsed by yacc/bison.

The scary part is the context aware tokenizer (tokenizing is the part that comes before parsing, and is hardly looked at when introducing parsers and compilers in CS studies).

In reply to Re^2: Understanding the Perl Interpreter by JavaFan
in thread Understanding the Perl Interpreter by Anonymous Monk

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