On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 10:11:07 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote: > On Apr 10, 11:35 am, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: >> On 2010-04-10, Patrick Maupin <pmau...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > as Pyparsing". Which is all well and good, except then the OP will >> > download pyparsing, take a look, realize that it uses regexps under >> > the hood, and possibly be very confused. >> >> I don't agree with that. If a person is trying to ski using pieces of >> wood that they carved themselves, I don't expect them to be surprised >> that the skis they buy are made out of similar materials. > > But, in this case, the guy ASKED how to make the skis in his woodworking > shop, and was told not to be silly -- you don't use wood to make skis -- > and then directed to go buy some skis that are, in fact, made out of > wood.
As entertaining as this is, the analogy is rubbish. Skis are far too simple to use as an analogy for a parser (he says, having never seen skis up close in his life *wink*). Have you looked at PyParsing's source code? Regexes are only a small part of the parser, and not analogous to the wood of skis. Perhaps a better analogy would be a tennis racket, with regexes being the strings. You have a whole lot of strings, not just one, and they are held together with a strong framework. Without the framework the strings are useless, and without the strings the racket doesn't do anything useful. Using this analogy, I would say the OP was wanting to play tennis with a single piece of string, and asking for advise on beefing it up to make it work better. Perhaps a knot tied in one end will help? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
