[ Cross-posted by invitation, from its home on the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Ideally, if a syntax is useful and clear, and a programmer can easily read it at a glance, you should be able to add it to an existing language. In this post, I will describe a modest incremental change to the Perl syntax.

It's one I like, because that's beside the point, for two reasons. First, it's simply intended as an example of language evolution. Second, regardless of its merits, it is unlikely to happen, because of the way that Perl 5 is parsed. In this post I will demonstrate a way of writing a parser, so that this change, or others, can be made in a straightforward way, and without designing your language into a corner.