> there are a large number of syntactical ambiguities, so writing a parser for it should be completely impossible
Keep in mind that while your protest does sound intuitive - e.g. that Ruby can be syntactically ambiguous, ergo it is unparseable, it turns out that that doesn't stop us from writing a parser. We can parse most things even if we can't parse the "general case." When we DO encounter something unparseable, the compiler can a) guess or b) fail, hopefully with a message that will help us investigate and rectify the failure.
You point out that Perl's syntax may be worse than Ruby's, and I assume that implies that it is more syntactically ambiguous, ergo, writing a parser should also be impossible for Perl. It turns out that Perl is provably unparseable in the general case - in fact, it's been done rather rigorously: http://www.jeffreykegler.com/Home/perl-and-undecidability
Regardless of Perl's general unparseability, we have compilers for Perl and even large projects manage to compile to what appear to be functional executables. The same is true for Ruby.
I wrote this comment mostly a reminder that while something may appear to be insoluble, we may be able to solve for sufficient cases that we don't care about the rest, particularly if we have an oracle to fix the number of cases that we can't solve. (In this case, the oracle is the developer.)
Keep in mind that while your protest does sound intuitive - e.g. that Ruby can be syntactically ambiguous, ergo it is unparseable, it turns out that that doesn't stop us from writing a parser. We can parse most things even if we can't parse the "general case." When we DO encounter something unparseable, the compiler can a) guess or b) fail, hopefully with a message that will help us investigate and rectify the failure.
You point out that Perl's syntax may be worse than Ruby's, and I assume that implies that it is more syntactically ambiguous, ergo, writing a parser should also be impossible for Perl. It turns out that Perl is provably unparseable in the general case - in fact, it's been done rather rigorously: http://www.jeffreykegler.com/Home/perl-and-undecidability
Regardless of Perl's general unparseability, we have compilers for Perl and even large projects manage to compile to what appear to be functional executables. The same is true for Ruby.
I wrote this comment mostly a reminder that while something may appear to be insoluble, we may be able to solve for sufficient cases that we don't care about the rest, particularly if we have an oracle to fix the number of cases that we can't solve. (In this case, the oracle is the developer.)