> by getting the whole parser onto a single screen, I find that I can get the whole problem into my brain’s working memory and avoid burning cycles scrolling up and down to pin down butterflies bugs.<p>This is an excellent point, and one that not enough programmers pay attention to (well, outside of the APL family of languages, anyway!)
The main issue I have with swapping Perl with Raku is that a major strength of Perl is its ubiquitousness. Except on Windows, it's almost certainly installed on 90% of the systems I have ever used. Meanwhile, rakudo is not even in the repositories of most distributions. It's not very encouraging, if I have to be honest.
Can someone give a little more background why a unit conversion library needs a parser?<p>Like an ELI5 for someone not into neither Perl or Raku and haven’t met the units library before.
> Yes – a recursive descent parser written from scratch in perl5 – pay dirt!<p>What made the author write this in the first place? He could use one of the many many parsing libraries, and then at least the comparison with Raku grammars would be honest and fair.
ISTM that a grammar parser is a library feature, not a language feature, per se. Any reason you couldn’t port the parser back to Perl 5 and get a similar savings in line count?