On Jun 5, 2011, at 6:12 PM, Thomas Davie wrote: > On 5 Jun 2011, at 18:22, Jens Alfke wrote: >> On Jun 5, 2011, at 6:21 AM, Thomas Davie wrote: >> >>> I've just completed firming up the API and documentation for CoreParse. >>> CoreParse provides a powerful tokenisation and parsing engine, which uses >>> shift-reduce parsing (unlike ParseKit) to support a wide range of context >>> free grammars. >>> >>> Parsers can be built quickly and easily using BNF like syntax. >> >> Cool! What advantages does this have over using a more-established tool like >> ANTLR? (“An Objective-C API” is an obvious answer, I suppose, but it doesn’t >> look that difficult to call into ANTLR-generated C++ code from Obj-C.) > > I've not investigated ANTLR, but you're right, my primary goal was a nice, > clean, cocoa-like API in pure Obj-C only API. The only comparable API that I > know of is ParseKit which uses recursive decent, and hence doesn't support a > lot of grammars. By comparison there, I support SLR, LR(1) and LALR(1), so > there's rather more coverage. > > I'd really appreciate you taking a look and reporting back if you find any > interesting things that ANTLR or other tools does better.
And just a reminder that Yacc/Bison is supported by Xcode with builtin build rules and build settings. Yacc/Bison is the original LALR(1) parser generator written by Steve Johnson of Bell Labs in the middle 1970's. Apple has cleverly set things up so that by using a .ym file instead of a .y file, all semantic actions can be written in Objective-C. Other settings are available to allow multiple Yacc-generated parsers per executable. It's an ancient tool, but it works well. Tom Wetmore _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
