Only perl can parse perl? Let's see.. Demo of how much of perl can be parsed using xtext.

I'm trying to closely following the parser structure from PPI. It's still at the very beginning of implementation. So far only the following elements have parser rules:

Statements:

• subs
• package declaration
• includes (use,require,pragmas)
• labels ('LINE:')

Structure:

• blocks ('{' .... '}')

Token:

• Comments
• Reserved keywords
• Operators, file-test operators (-e...)
• Strings,numbers
• Quotelike (q,qq,qx..)
• Backticks
• Regex (s,m,tr)...
• DATA / END
• POD
• Array-Deref (@{$...})

Known issues:

• Does not recognize regex with missing match prefix-char "m".
• Regex and quote-like delimiters limited to the most-used combinations //,||,<>,{}
• Package references in includes need to be on the project classpath in order for xtext to resolve them. This would need to be extended to include searching PERL5LIB.