Re: [MacPerl] what's it look like under the hood?

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 22.58 +0900 1999.11.20, Joel Rees wrote:
>Okay, I am required by my job to learn Perl so I can teach it. I am
>considering learning it for my personal use. I want to know what
>advantages it has over my two favorite languages, FORTH and C.

It isn't FORTH or C.  That is its primary advantage.


>First, would anyone dare implement Perl in Perl?

Yes.  Anyone would dare do anything.


>This is an archaic bragging issue that turns out to have been irrelevant,
>but I hope to get an idea of how well Perl supports parsing complex
>grammars. It looks great for parsing e-mail generated by html forms, but
>that's pretty straightforward stuff.
>
>Second, does Perl optimize?

Yes.


>How well?

Yes.


>Can it reduce constant expressions?

Yes.


>Third, does Perl have multiple internal stacks, specifically splitting
>the control data (return addresses) from the parameter data? (I am one of
>those kinds of programmers with a bad habit of walking on my return
>addresses in C.)

I don't know.  Read the source.


>Fourth, what does the Perl symbol table look like? Hash table?

Yes.


>Is nesting
>achieved by naming games?

I don't know.  Read the source.


>I admit I am being lazy by asking these questions here, instead of in the
>main Perl lists, or even looking in the source code myself. Just trying
>to save time for my family. :-)

I don't understand what makes you think such a question asked of the people
who don't know very much about the subject would save you time over asking
people who work in the perl source every day, such as on the clpm*
newsgroups.  And there is absolutely no substitute for reading the source.

-- 
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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