Hello, 2010/1/29 Liam <liam.ga...@gmail.com>: > Could someone educate me about what developers normally do when faced > with having to create a lexer / parser / analyzer, say for clojure? > > Why would people go with a canned solution, i.e. ready-made like soup > out of a can, instead of by hand? > > E.g. why did the Counterclockwise Eclipse plug-in for Clojure use > ANTLR ,
Concerning Counterclockwise, it's simple: a combination of reasons * I wanted to play with ANTLR since we were also using it at work * Not much of Counterclockwise was written in clojure at that time Note that currently, there's a joint effort to provide clojure-based parsing for Counterclockwise : I'm working to create a port of paredit during my spare time, currently using a hand-written clojure parser (YAHWCP Yet Another Hand Written Clojure Parser - not a reader, a parser which produces a parsetree), and Christophe Grand is working on the general solution of providing a parser generator. > or why did in the Enclojure NetBeans plug-in for clojure use > JFLEX? Why in clojure itself is there a reader made by hand and not > using a canned generator? > > Am I naive in thinking one should do that by hand? Is this archaic > thinking like those who still prefer building websites in HTML by > hand? Note there is the fnparse library, too ( http://github.com/joshua-choi/fnparse ) > What's the advantage of doing that, say for clojure or in general? You > still have to learn how a given generator works. And you may be > limited by its design. What if you want fine combed control over how > things are parsed to get, for example, sophisticated syntax based > evaluation or inferences from cold code. E.g. like what Eclipse does > for Java and their “Java Models” and exhaustive “Abstract Syntax Tree” > nodes? > > I hope some of you could be generous enough to enlighten me. I'm not sufficiently expert in the subject to give you this enlightenment, sorry. P.S. : what is a cold node ? >From the vocabulary you're using, one could infer you're not a beginner on the subject, so certainly you could do well with any tool. I guess one of the purposes of such tools is to guide the users by providing "built-in semantics" for thinking about the problem domain. Another purpose may be that those tools provide more "declarative" ways to define their grammars. -- Laurent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
