Parrot and GCC (Was: Re: Perl, Python and noo perl SEC: UNCLASSIFIED)

[Sam Couter]

Jeremy <jepri at webone.com.au> wrote:
> Any attempt to write a compiler for perl (or python) will result in a 
> compiler that produces programs that are really just an interpreter 
> with the program included in the file somewhere.

Or it could generate code that knows how to call run-time libraries
which implement the same smarts as the interpreter.

> because gcc just can't cope with all languages.  If you can't translate 
> a language into C, you can't compile it with gcc.  Perl doesn't even 
> have a context free grammar to work with.

Shouldn't the grammar become irrelevant once the perl code has been
parsed?

Anyway... the perl interpreter is written in C. So there's nothing you
can do in perl that you can't do in C. In fact, everything you do in
perl is really being done in C anyway. Perl just makes some things
easier than C.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:scouter at bigpond.net.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at jabber.topic.com.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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