Re^4: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk

[pmichaud]

My point was not about that. But rather about explaining people why building a Grammar engine for Perl 6 is so difficult, as I understand that has roots in the mutable aspects of Perl 6 Grammar.

Okay then - restricting myself to my 2009 list above - these are the ones that cover why the grammar engine for Perl 6 is so difficult/special/unique/important:

• Perl 6 Advent Calendar (specifically Day 24: The Perl 6 standard grammar, Day 21: Grammars and Actions, and Day 10: A Regex Story)
• Practically all of Larry Wall's keynote addresses and invited talks
• Chris Dolan, Using Rakudo grammars, Frozen Perl 2009
• Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, Nordic Perl Workshop 2009
• Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, Nordic Perl Workshop, 2009
• Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 regexes and grammars, YAPC::NA 2009
• Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, YAPC::NA 2009
• Morris Siegel, Enhancing Perl 6 pattern-matching with ideas from Snobol4, YAPC::NA 2009
• Larry Wall and Damian Conway, Perl 6 Update, OSCON 2009
• Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, OSCON 2009
• Damian Conway, Perl 6 update, YAPC::EU 2009

Not from my earlier list, we should probably include (still in 2009):

• Patrick Michaud, Hague grant work: the new regex engine and NQP
• Patrick Michaud, Hague grant status report, milestones M1/M2
• Damian Conway, The Missing Link, keynote at YAPC::EU 2009
• Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop

And, of course, I've been talking and giving grammar engine specific talks since YAPC::NA in 2005, because (as chromatic++ said in the other thread) that's what ends up being important to completing a Perl 6 implementation.

... in this world you have to blow your own trumpet.

See the lists above for the concerts you missed in 2009. :-)

Giving people a feel of(Technical matters of the compiler, not features of the language) will do a lot of help.

Part of what makes Perl 6 so special is that the technical matters of the compiler are features of the language. That's what makes it possible to write Perl 6 (as well as many other languages) in Perl 6, and have operator overloading, and metaoperators, and macros, etc. That's why almost every talk about "how to build a language using Parrot / Perl 6" or "Perl 6 regular expressions" ultimately ends up demonstrating the underlying complexity of the grammar engine.

Pm