SPUG: Creating other "languages" from perl

Ryan Allen ryan at the-summit.net
Sat Nov 19 13:20:01 PST 2005


At my work I have created a new "language" per say out of perl for
conducting automated tests.  It started out as a bunch of scripts, that
slowly evolved into a high level test definition "language", that allows
users to configure a machine, then pass traffic through the machine and
get stats.

Whats become a problem is, this "language" is not really a language at
all.  It's a  script file that gets read by a large perl program, and
the perl program does what the script tells it to do.  This has become
very limiting.  I need to add more functionality to the script files
like loops, counter variables, namespaces and perhaps subroutines.

I've thought about simply using perl, and just creating many very high
level helper objects and methods to make this easier.  However, I really
don't want to do that for it goes against most of the design goals of
this test scripting language.

Are there perhaps any packages or modules that may make this more easy
to implement?

Has anybody out there done anything similar?  Perhaps we could brain
meld? 

Does anybody know of any resources or places to go for information for
such tasks?

Thanks for any input you have to offer,

    - Ryan
-- 

+-----------------------------+
|     ryan at the-summit.net     |
|  http://www.the-summit.net  |
+-----------------------------+


More information about the spug-list mailing list