Looking for champion - std.lang.d.lex

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/22/10 14:17 CDT, Walter Bright wrote:
> Tomek Sowiński wrote:
>> Interesting idea. Here's another: D will soon need bindings for CORBA,
>> Thrift, etc, so lexers will have to be written all over to grok
>> interface files. Perhaps a generic tokenizer which can be parametrized
>> with a lexical grammar would bring more ROI, I got a hunch D's
>> templates are strong enough to pull this off without any source code
>> generation ala JavaCC. The books I read on compilers say tokenization
>> is a solved problem, so the theory part on what a good abstraction
>> should be is done. What you think?
>
> Lexers are so simple, it is less work to just build them by hand than
> use lexer generator tools.

I wrote a C++ lexer. It wasn't at all easy except if I compared it 
against the work necessary to build a full compiler.

Andrei