Perl is dead

[ben@bpfh.net]

On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 01:59:00PM +0100, Robin Berjon wrote:
>On Dec 4, 2008, at 13:33 , Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
>>How do we reach people outside the community after having spent so  
>>much
>>time talking to ourselves?
>
>This is something that I don't have the technical know-how to  
>accomplish, but a way of using Perl from within PHP, I'm guessing as a  
>library extension, would provide a strong deployment vector into a  
>large and talkative community that is often blissfully ignorant that  
>there even is anything else. It would be a neat way to show cool  
>tricks, and the power of CPAN. Doug MacEachern had suggested he was  
>working on something like that ages ago, but I don't know if it went  
>anywhere.

I am doing some (extremely PoC at present) hacking with the new Java 7
invokedynamic / MethodHandles technology, towards implementing a toy / 
for interest only dynamic language with (a subset of) Perl syntax on 
the JVM.

I am making some limited progress, viz:

package TestB;

# Bring a Java class into scope
use java.util.HashMap;

sub bar {
	my $b = 1;
	my $c;
    	my $obj = new HashMap();

# FIXME No auto-inc operators yet
    # $b++;

	if ($b == 0) { 
    		$b = "yyyyyy";
    	} else {
        	$b = "zzzzzz";
    	}

	print $b;
	print $obj->toString();
}

1;

will parse and compile to a .class - although the dynamic invocation 
stuff isn't integrated yet.

I would welcome collaborators / people to talk about it with at the
pub, from within the Perl community or the Java community, or any other.

Thanks,

Ben