GSOC 2011

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/23/11 11:42 AM, Luca Boasso wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply,
> even tough I'm not an ANTLR expert, given my previous experience with the tool
> and having read most of the official book, I could help more on this GSOC
> idea.
>
> I have looked at http://www.antlr.org/grammar/list and on google and I could not
> find any recent ANTLR grammar for D.
> In my opinion this project could be a good contribution for the D community
> while being practical and useful in the short term.

There are two aspects: writing an ANTLR grammar that parses D (which you 
are referring to) and also adding to ANTLR the capability of generating 
D. The latter would allow D users to create and use parsers for various 
languages. It would also require close cooperation with the ANTLR people 
for acceptance etc.

(Sticking with the former project for now.) This is a technically 
interesting project. I'd need to hear more about the high-level 
motivation. What is the "business" motivation? There is already a parser 
for D written in C++ (the open-source front-end of dmd), so the project 
would need to build a good case for the added value. Also there are 
other D parser projects that people work on (ddmd comes to mind), so I'd 
need to hear a lot more in the way of justifying the utility of such a 
project.


Thanks,

Andrei