Higher Order Primitives in PHP (and more...)

Thanks again to Harry, I stumbled across two fascinating projects that tackle a particular fundamental problem in PHP5. The ambition of metaphp is to take over the world, and that's actually not such an unreasonable prospect considering that it seems to work well enough to generate the building blocks of a parser for Javascript syntax in PHP. Wow. Take a deep breath. Putting functional programming constructs into PHP is not a trivial thing to do. This is mad crazy stuff but absolutely important for PHP as a language - JVM wizards might laugh at the brutal BNF hack that is the infamous PHP interpreter, but hey - what makes PHP great is it's core library of functions implemented in idiomatic C form. Manipulating strings in PHP is thus blindingly faster than almost anything else, and so it should be. The idea of implementing a parser generator in this web focused language might seem counter intuitive at first, but look! It damn well works...