Hello, I'm a french CS student at the University of Bordeaux. I'm currently following a masters degree course specialized in network communications and administration. I've been interested in free software for a couple of years now and have been willing to help a project for some time, but never found one I could help with a significant contribution before that.
I have decided to candidate for the project "Parse Makefile.am using an Abstract Syntax Tree". The reason I'm choosing this subject over the other one is that I already have good knowledge about ASTs. I have worked on a small programming language as an assignment (project here : <https://services.emi.u-bordeaux.fr/projet/viewvc/compilfinal/> but it is very poorly written). It is a very basic interpreter for a trimmed Pascal programming language written in C with Flex and Bison. On this project I've worked on the syntax and semantic analysis as well the lexer (which is not a big deal with Flex). I've already met with Mathieu Lirzin to talk about the project so I have a general idea of what is expected of this GSoC. From my understanding, both proposed subjects' goal is to go towards Automake's eventual modularization. The benefits of generating this AST from a Makefile.am file would be to separate the different code generation phases, improve the test suite by testing each phase separately and probably others that it can't think about now. My knowledge in Perl may be my weak point for this project as I only know a bit of the syntax. But I am familiar with other programming languages, principally C and Python. If you have any suggestions on documents I can read or software I can check to prepare for this project I'll be glad to check them. I know texinfo is written in Perl and generates an AST so I'll check that. Thanks. -- Matthias Paulmier
