Perl 6 and traditional compilers

morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

waiting for Rakudo Star I was just perusing some Perl 6 related web-sites when I came across this statement from Patrick Michaud:

Anyone who thinks that Perl 6 is fundamentally based on traditional compiler construction techniques taught in universities frankly has no clue as to what a fundamental paradigm shift Perl 6 represents to language design and implementation.

Has someone here enough background to explain in more details why "traditional compiler construction techniques" were not sufficient for Rakudo or maybe can point to some papers/presentations?

Many thanks!

Comment on Perl 6 and traditional compilers

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Re: Perl 6 and traditional compilers by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jul 28, 2010 at 19:53 UTC
Perl 6 allows you to change the language's grammar, and those changes take place within a lexical scope. To make that work, you have to be able to modify the grammar as parsing takes place. This is not trivial.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl 6 and traditional compilers by morgon (Priest) on Jul 28, 2010 at 19:59 UTC
Ah, interesting. Will this be covered in the Perl 6 book (it is not in the version I have downloaded recently) or could you point me to some other documentation on how this works (from a usage point of view, not the implemenation details).	[reply]
Re^3: Perl 6 and traditional compilers by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 29, 2010 at 07:44 UTC
Will this be covered in the Perl 6 book No, the book focuses on using Perl 6, not on the trickiness of implementing it. or could you point me to some other documentation on how this works For example S06 talks about operator overloading and defining new operators, S13 does that too. Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.	[reply]