I'm trying to realize a Lisp-like macro mechanism in Perl to get a general and reliable extension mechanism.

I successfully hacked B::Deparse such that function calls to macros are replaced with the string returned.

This works fine when translating the body of single functions with B::Deparse::coderef2text the resulting code is evaluated afterwards to replace the body.

Now I'm looking for ideas how to this for complete files.

My current approach is to use a codefilter to wrap the whole file with

macroexpand {
   ... oldfile ...
}
[download]

But it gets tricky when handling __DATA__ and __END__ and anyway the idea was to get rid of codefilters

So does anybody know of a way to change the op-tree just after compilation?

I'm pondering to modify B::Deparse::compile for this purpose and to call it within CHECK { ... } or UNITCHECK {...}

An other approach would be to reset the implicit DATA filehandle to reread the code just after compilation phase.

Any brain storming idea is welcome.