Jeffrey Goff

Perl 6 grammars and regular expressions are incredibly powerful, but with great power comes great risk of mangling Spider-Man quotes. Let's look at some of the common language patterns and learn together how to refactor them into reusable modules, complete with pluggable actions including Abstract Syntax Trees and Just-In-Time evaluators, all ready for you to add to your language parser.

Witness the life cycle of a single Perl 6 module from creation to adulthood, learning some tips and tricks on the way as we dodge some bullets and fall headlong into cleverly-concealed traps. We'll talk about Perl 6 coding style, code layout, and some of the compromises you have to make during development.

We'll start by demystifying Perl 6 regular expressions with some help from Perl5. From there we'll name the blocks that we've captured along the way, and refactor our regular expressions into Perl 6 rules and tokens. Those rules and tokens will combine to form a full Perl 6 grammar, and actions let us generate an abstract syntax tree directly from a bunch of little regular expressions.