Anyone interested in a Spirit for D?

[J Duncan]

Pragma wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Along the lines of Don's regexp template metaprograms, is anyone 
>> interested in a Spirit-like parser generator capability in D?
>>
>> http://spirit.sourceforge.net/
>>
>> Apparently, someone has gotten Spirit to work with C#:
>>
>> http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/spart.asp
> 
> Now there's an idea!
> 
> Words of caution to follow:
> 
> FWIW, I looked into doing this years ago, and didn't get to far.  The 
> biggest hurdle, aside from the limitations of templates at the time, was 
> a lack of unary operators to override.  In particular, not being able to 
> override unary '*' and '!' caused some cosmetic problems.
> 
> The only other major hangup I had was not having IFTI so I could 
> instantiate templates transparently.  This feature alone could close the 
> gap on most of Spirit's useage of C++ templates.  At a minimum, it means 
> that a D programmer could get very close to the cosmetic appeal of 
> Spirit (operator problems aside).
> 
> Don't get me wrong: I'm not a nay-sayer here.  I think this is very 
> doable and worthwhile suggestion by Walter.  Folks should take it 
> seriously. But it will require some design compromises and changes from 
> the original - IMO, it'll probably require more of a re-write than a port.
> 

Yeah Its a good idea, but my first thought was "is that even possible?" 
It wont be spirit, but a lexer in the uh spirit of spirit :)