std.d.lexer requirements

[Timon Gehr]

On 08/03/2012 05:08 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, August 02, 2012 23:00:41 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 8/2/12 10:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> To reiterate another point, since we are in the compiler business,
>>> people will expect std.d.lexer to be of top quality, not some bag on the
>>> side. It needs to be usable as a base for writing a professional quality
>>> compiler. It's the reason why I'm pushing much harder on this than I do
>>> for other modules.
>>
>> The lexer must be configurable enough to tokenize other languages than
>> D. I confess I'm very unhappy that there seem to be no less than three
>> people determined to write lexers for D. We're wasting precious talent
>> and resources doubly. Once, several people are working in parallel on
>> the same product. Second, none of them is actually solving the problem
>> that should be solved.
>
> You're not going to get as fast a lexer if it's not written specifically for D.

This should certainly be possible.

> Writing a generic lexer is a different problem.

It is a more general problem.