The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.
 / 
Marpa-0.001_033
5 ++
/ Marpa

NAME

Marpa - Overview of the Marpa Modules

DESCRIPTION

This is a branch from Parse::Marpa. This branch started out experimental, but is gradually being released in alpha. The first alpha release will be an HTML parser, Marpa::UrHTML.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Kegler

Why is it Called "Marpa"?

Marpa is the name of the greatest of the Tibetan "translators". In his time (the 11th century AD) Indian Buddhism was at its height. A generation of scholars was devoting itself to producing Tibetan versions of Buddhism's Sanskrit scriptures. Marpa became the greatest of them, and today is known as Marpa Lotsawa: "Marpa the Translator".

Translation in the 11th century was not a job for the indoors type. A translator needed to study in India, with the teachers who had the texts and could explain them. From Marpa's home in Tibet's Lhotrak Valley, the best way across the Himalayas to India was over the Khala Chela Pass. To reach the Khala Chela's three-mile high summit, Marpa had to cross two hundred lawless miles of Tibet. Once a pilgrim crested the Himalayas, the road to Nalanda University was all downhill. Eager to reach their destination, the first travelers from Tibet had descended the four hundred miles straight to the hot plains.

The last part of the journey had turned out to be by far the most deadly. Almost no germs live in the cold, thin air of Tibet. Pilgrims who didn't stop to acclimatize themselves reached the great Buddhist center with no immunity to India's diseases. Several large expeditions reached Nalanda only to have every single member die within weeks.

Blatant Plug

There's more about Marpa in my novel, The God Proof, in which his studies, travels and adventures are a subplot. The God Proof centers around Kurt Gödel's proof of God's existence. Yes, that Kurt Gödel, and yes, he really did work out a God Proof (it's in his Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 403-404). The God Proof is available as a free download (http://www.lulu.com/content/933192) and in print form at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/God-Proof-Jeffrey-Kegler/dp/1434807355.

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-parse-marpa at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Marpa. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc Marpa

You can also look for information at:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Marpa is derived from the parser described in Aycock and Horspool 2002. I've made significant changes to it, which are documented separately (Marpa::Doc::Algorithm). Aycock and Horspool, for their part, built on the algorithm discovered by Jay Earley.

I'm grateful to Randal Schwartz for his encouragement over the years that I've been working on Marpa. My one conversation with Larry Wall about Marpa was brief and long ago, but his openness to the idea was a major encouragement, and his insights into how humans do programming, how they do languages, and how those two endeavors interconnect, a major influence. More recently, Allison Randal and Patrick Michaud have been generous with their very valuable time. They might have preferred that I volunteered as a Parrot cage-cleaner, but if so, they were too polite to say.

Many at perlmonks.org answered questions for me. I used answers from chromatic, Corion, dragonchild, jdporter, samtregar and Juerd, among others, in writing this module. I'm just as grateful to those whose answers I didn't use. My inquiries were made while I was thinking out the code and it wasn't always 100% clear what I was after. If the butt is moved after the round, it shouldn't count against the archer.

In writing the Pure Perl version of Marpa, I benefited from studying the work of Francois Desarmenien (Parse::Yapp), Damian Conway (Parse::RecDescent) and Graham Barr (Scalar::Util). Adam Kennedy patiently instructed me in module writing, both on the finer points and on issues about which I really should have know better.

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2007-2009 Jeffrey Kegler, all rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl 5.10.0.