Pegged: Syntax Highlighting

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/17/12 9:13 AM, Philippe Sigaud wrote:
>> I want to use Pegged for that purpose. So go ahead an commit the D grammar
>> ;)
>> Would be so awesome if Pegged would be able to parse D.
>>
>> ~Extrawurst
>
> The D grammar is a 1000-line / hundreds of rules monster. I finished
> writing it and am now crushing bugs.
> God, that generates a 10_000 line module to parse it. I should
> simplify the code generator somewhat.

Science is done. Welcome to implementation :o).

I can't say how excited I am about this direction. I have this vision of 
having a D grammar published on the website that is actually "it", i.e. 
the same exact grammar is used by a validator that goes through all of 
our test suite. (The validator wouldn't do any semantic checking.) The 
parser generator _and_ the reference D grammar would be available in 
Phobos, so for anyone it would be dirt cheap to parse some D code and 
wander through the generated AST. The availability of a reference 
grammar and parser would be golden to a variety of D toolchain creators.

Just to gauge interest:

1. Would you consider submitting your work to Phobos?

2. Do you think your approach can generate parsers competitive with 
hand-written ones? If not, why?


Andrei