Wow. The Perl6 slang feature is awesome. I can't believe I missed it.
I haven't had a chance to use Perl 6 but I would really like an excuse. I love Lua's LPeg module. Perl 6 has deeply embedded PEGs (i.e. Grammars, aka parsing combinators) into it's design. Knowing first-hand how powerful PEGs can be if the engine and language integration is implemented well, I've never doubted the awesomeness and elegance of Perl 6. It's unclear to me if Perl 6 Grammars' Action feature is as powerful as LPeg's capturing and inline transformation primitives[1], but the fact that you can plug a grammar into Perl 6's parser is crazy awesome.
I'm not surprised Slang exists--I've known it was possible; just surprised that it's a module and idiomatic pattern and I hadn't read about it before.
[1] See http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/#captures Most PEG engines just return your raw parse tree as a complete data structure and require you to fix it up manually. LPeg has really well thought-out extensions that allow you to express capture and tree transformations much more naturally; specifically, inline (both syntactically and runtime execution) with the pattern definition(s).
I haven't had a chance to use Perl 6 but I would really like an excuse. I love Lua's LPeg module. Perl 6 has deeply embedded PEGs (i.e. Grammars, aka parsing combinators) into it's design. Knowing first-hand how powerful PEGs can be if the engine and language integration is implemented well, I've never doubted the awesomeness and elegance of Perl 6. It's unclear to me if Perl 6 Grammars' Action feature is as powerful as LPeg's capturing and inline transformation primitives[1], but the fact that you can plug a grammar into Perl 6's parser is crazy awesome.
I'm not surprised Slang exists--I've known it was possible; just surprised that it's a module and idiomatic pattern and I hadn't read about it before.
[1] See http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/#captures Most PEG engines just return your raw parse tree as a complete data structure and require you to fix it up manually. LPeg has really well thought-out extensions that allow you to express capture and tree transformations much more naturally; specifically, inline (both syntactically and runtime execution) with the pattern definition(s).