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Thanks for the excellent answer, and I am certainly considering Haskell (even though I didn't mention it). I'll grab the book as well. I'd still like to make t

by rch 16y ago

Thanks for the excellent answer, and I am certainly considering Haskell (even though I didn't mention it). I'll grab the book as well. I'd still like to make the best case for the AST side though, since my first goal is to compare the two approaches directly. I'd hate to relay what you've listed to a bunch of Perl programmers just to have someone stand up and ask about Lua0x, or some such. It might be worth noting that this project is only on the table because the Python generator just plain works... Anyway, thanks again.

GregBuchholz 16y ago
You'll also want to investigate Prolog. That's the grandfather of pattern-matching tree-manipulation languages. Also, it is dynamically typed if that floats your boat more than Haskell or ML. ML always forces you to deal with incomplete patterns, but you need to specifically ask your Haskell compiler to warn you about incomplete patterns. It is hard to beat Prolog for quickly whipping up prototype language interpreters. Besides pattern matching, there are easy to use symbols (just start a word with a lower case letter), declarative semantics, definite clause grammars (for parsing), user definable infix, prefix, and postfix operators, etc
- rch 16y ago
  Thanks very much! That is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for.