Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday 21 October 2010 15:01:21 Walter Bright wrote:
> 5. generally follow along with the C++ one so that they can be maintained
> in tandem

Does this mean that you want a pseudo-port of the C++ front end's lexer to D for 
this? Or are you looking for just certain pieces of it to be similar?

I haven't looked at the front end code yet, so I don't know how it works there, 
but I wouldn't expect it to uses ranges, for instance, so I would expect that 
the basic design would naturally stray a bit from whatever was done in C++ 
simply by doing things in fairly idiomatic D. And if I do look at the front end 
to see how that's done, there's the issue of the license. As I understand it, 
the front end is LGPL, and Phobos is generally Boost, which would mean that I 
would be looking at LGPL-licensed code when designing Boost-licensed, even 
though it wouldn't really be copying the code per se since it's a change of 
language (though if you did the whole front end, obviously the license issue can 
be waved quite easily).

License issues aside, however, I do think that it would make sense for 
std.lang.d.lex to do things similiarly to the C++ front end, even if there are a 
number of basic differences.

- Jonathan M Davis