Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-10-22 22:42, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jacob Carlborg"<doob at me.com>  wrote in message
> news:i9spln$lbj$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> On 2010-10-22 17:37, BLS wrote:
>>> Why not creating a DLL/so based Lexer/Parser based on the existing DMD
>>> front end.? It could be always up to date. Necessary Steps. functional
>>> wrappers around C++ classes, Implementing the visitor pattern (AST),
>>> create std.lex and std.parse..
>>>
>>> my 2 cents
>>>
>>> On 22/10/2010 00:01, 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?
>>>
>>
>> I think it would be better to create a lexer/parser in D and have it in
>> the standard library. Then one could begin the process of porting the DMD
>> frontend using this library. Then hopefully the DMD frontend will be
>> written in D and use this new library, being one code base and will always
>> be up to date.
>>
>
> *cough* DDMD

I know, I would more than love to see DDMD becoming the official D 
compiler but if that will happen I would still like that the frontend is 
based on the lexer/parser library in phobos.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg