Daniel Carrera <dcarrera / math.umd.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Phil Tomson wrote:
> 
>> Parsing Perl is not easy...
> 
> There's a saying among Perl mongers:
> 
>  "Only Perl can parse Perl"   :-)

Pedantically, "only perl can parse Perl" (highlighting the distinction
between perl-the-interpreter and Perl-the-language).

> Seriously, I'm sure that this is possible, but I'm not sure it's worth
> it.  It might be better to translate CPAN to Ruby.  Unfortunatelly, nearly
> all of CPAN is written with XS, which is a Perl-only tool.  I don't know
> how hard it'd be to translate XS to SWIG, but my experience is that XS is
> quite complicated.

As Simon Cozens pointed out, we could start by porting some of the
Perl-parsing modules by hand, and bootstrap from there.

martin