Welp, I'm back at the office for my last week. While I was they moved my desk to a different floor and when I came back I didnt even know where I was supposed to be! Anyway, its only a week of handover activities and then I can get back to hacking perl...
Speaking of hacking perl, my latest plan is to get the regex engine truely pluggable. Id like to make it possible, and preferably easy, to use alternate regex engines such as PCRE inside of perl.
My motivation for this is mostly to enable lexically scoped and run time control over debugging regexes, and partly so that I can do performance comparisons with other engines.
The possibilities are kinda crazy tho. If done properly one could easily implement the Perl 6 grammar engine as a perl 5 regex engine implementation, which itself uses perl 5's regex engine internally. Yes, this means one could hypothetically write their own regex engine in Perl. :-)
I have to say, im really eager to get cracking on this. Id love to benchmark PCRE against Perls native language, and well lexically scoped debug mode regexes would be a real asset to debugging unexpected regex behaviour.
(Trying to post more often to my journal.)
