Re: Possible to write compiler to Java VM? (I volunteer to summarize)

Thomas Boutell <boutell.com@holly.aa.net> wrote:
: Perl: I don't see any technical barriers to this. Perl does have
: closures but I get the impression they are closer to Java's exceptions
: in implementation complexity.


Perl's built-in data types tend to be more extensible and allomorphic
than Java's, so most of them would have to be represented as classes.
You also have the problem of recoding the formatting and regular
expression engines in Java.


Also, you should probably count Perl in with the multiple inheritance
languages. But you might have to emulate the class structure anyway,
since Perl just uses package namespaces (symbol tables) for classes,
and Java isn't likely to provide this degree of freedom. Especially
considering that inheritance is defined dynamically, and objects can
change their class on the fly.


Larry Wall
lwall@sems.com
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