Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by EdwardDiego 4497 days ago
> once you grokked the grammar

Perl has a grammar? In seriousness, the old aphorism that "the only thing that can parse Perl is Perl" didn't help Perl. The tooling lags behind that available for other dynamic languages.

1 comments

Perl6 is pretty awesome in that regard. The grammar specification is written in the language itself[0] in a single file using the language's rules[1] feature. Perl6 is an amazing language, but it is hampered by a runtime that is currently too slow, a bad public perception, and a tiny community.

[0]: https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules