I was in the shower this morning and a thought struck me (anybody else observe similar occurrances of solutions coming to you in the shower?) about compiling Perl. What if the whole thing is being approached from the wrong angle? Previously the challenge has been to write another parser for the Perl language to accomplish the task of compilation. However, has it not been said that we shouldn't reinvent the wheel? There's already a perfectly good Perl parser out there--Perl! So what if the task of compilation is done by translating Perl's *bytecode* into machine code? Is this even a reasonable idea? I don't know much (read: anything) about Perl's bytecode (can anybody point me to some documentation?), but it seems to me that this could be somewhat easier than compiling the language.
~Cybercosis