Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:i9vs3v$142e$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Walter:
>
>> 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.
>
> This is a quite long talk by Steve Yegge that I've just seen (linked from 
> Reddit):
> http://vimeo.com/16069687
>
> I don't suggest you to see it all unless you are very interested in that 
> topic. But the most important thing it says is that, given that big 
> software companies use several languages, and programmers often don't want 
> to change their preferred IDE, there is a problem: given N languages and M 
> editors/IDEs, total toolchain effort is N * M. That means N syntax 
> highlighters, N indenters, N refactoring suites, etc. Result: most 
> languages have bad toolchains and most IDEs manage very well only one or 
> very few languages.
>
> So he has suggested the Grok project, that allows to reduce the toolchain 
> effort to N + M. Each language needs to have one of each service: 
> indenter, highlighter, name resolver, refactory, etc. So each IDE may link 
> (using a standard interface provided by Grok) to those services and use 
> them.
>
> Today Grok is not available yet, and its development is at the first 
> stages, but after this talk I think that it may be positive to add to 
> Phobos not just the D lexer, but also other things, even a bit higher 
> level as an indenter, highlighter, name resolver, refactory, etc. Even if 
> they don't use the standard universal interface used by Grok I think they 
> may speed up the development of the D toolchain.
>

I haven't looked at the video, but that sounds like the direction I've had 
in mind for Goldie.