Re: Hacking language syntax

The files you want to change in PHP core are the lexer (http://code.google.com/p/php-alternative-syntax/source/browse/trunk/php-5.3.0/Zend/zend_language_scanner.l) and the scanner (http://code.google.com/p/php-alternative-syntax/source/browse/trunk/php-5.3.0/Zend/zend_language_parser.y) and then recompile. Unfortunately this approach makes your PHP code incompatible with all other PHP installations. Furthermore the learning code is _very_ steep because the files are pretty messy and hardly commented (IMO), which makes everything but the simplest of changes pretty hard. I walked down the same road you are now contemplating with http://code.google.com/p/php-alternative-syntax/ but soon abandoned the idea :) I collected some information about opcodes and the Zend core here: http://code.google.com/p/php-alternative-syntax/source/browse/#svn/trunk/documentation they might be useful for you. At the moment - being interested in language design - I'm contemplating building a meta language that compiles down to PHP instead which would keep things compatible. If you are interested it is called "snow" and looks like http://pastebin.com/9h1d3RpN . Cheers Rune