I've recently been thinking about overloading Perl operators to do different things, in the context of Parse::Perl, a pure Perl parser. Now, writing a Perl parser in Perl isn't really that hard. All you have to do is convert the C parser to Perl, which you can do in a semi-automated way. The problem is making Parse::Perl useful: people are going to use it to change the language, and currently the parser is *very* tied to the lexer, which is horrible C code very tied to the current Perl language. I'm almost convinced that we need a new parsing solution (and get completely away from yacc and lex). But that won't be easy, will it Damian ;-) What do you guys reckon? How much are you going to want to change the language?
