OO misconceptions

[François Pinard]

[James_Althoff at i2.com]

> Plus the fact that Perl sucks.  (Just kidding.  (Well, not really.
> (Well, kinda, sorta))). ;-)

Perl was immensely useful to me.  Than Python came, which allows me to
write bigger projects, allowing them to be much more maintainable.  I'm very
grateful to Perl, believe me.  But I would resent being forced into using
Perl, now that I have something which I enjoy even more that I enjoyed Perl.

I'm still dreaming about an automatic Perl to Python converter.  Despite many
consider this is not possible, I stick with my naive impression we could
do something about it.  It could revolve around three parts: analysing Perl
into a tree, applying some tree-transformational engine using a specialised
language (I wrote a few such in my life), and producing final Python text.

Would you believe, this is the first step which looks most difficult to me.
Parsing Perl might not be that difficult after all, but its tokenizer is
extremely hairy, and rather discouraging.  If I could swallow that snake,
the rest would not necessarily be easy, but at least, it would be fun! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard