Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, October 21, 2010 15:01:21 Walter Bright wrote:
> As we all know, tool support is important for D's success. Making tools
> easier to build will help with that.
> 
> To that end, I think we need a lexer for the standard library -
> std.lang.d.lex. It would be helpful in writing color syntax highlighting
> filters, pretty printers, repl, doc generators, static analyzers, and even
> D compilers.
> 
> It should:
> 
> 1. support a range interface for its input, and a range interface for its
> output 2. optionally not generate lexical errors, but just try to recover
> and continue 3. optionally return comments and ddoc comments as tokens
> 4. the tokens should be a value type, not a reference type
> 5. generally follow along with the C++ one so that they can be maintained
> in tandem
> 
> It can also serve as the basis for creating a javascript implementation
> that can be embedded into web pages for syntax highlighting, and
> eventually an std.lang.d.parse.
> 
> Anyone want to own this?

You mean that you're going to make someone actually pull out their compiler 
book? ;)

I'd love to do this (lexers and parsers are great fun IMHO - it's the code 
generation that isn't so fun), but I'm afraid that I'm busy enough at the moment 
that if I take it on, it won't get done very quickly. It is so very tempting 
though...

So, as long as you're not in a hurry, I'm up for it, but I can't guarantee 
anything even approaching fast delivery.

- Jonathan M Davis