So... let's document dmd

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/6/2016 1:09 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> TextMate, Sublime and Atom all use the same syntax to describe the grammar for a
> language. All of them supports plugins (to various degrees), but none of them
> uses plugins to syntax highlight code, as far as I know.
>
> I guess it's easier for most of us, I know you write a lexer in two days :), to
> use the custom syntax to describe the grammar than to create a proper lexer and
> parser.

I doubt any of them could lex C/C++ correctly (trigraphs, macros, backslash line 
splicing, wysiwyg string literals).

Even D has some issues - token string literals - that would defeat most grammar 
attempts.

A straightforward lexer (i.e. one not heavily optimized for speed) written in a 
reasonable high level language does not look all that different from BNF, and 
has the advantage of not being borked if something is not quite expressible in 
the grammar language.


 > Note that a lexer is not enough, these grammars can describe how a
 > function (and other constructs) look like.

Are you talking about an AST?

(Good luck doing an AST for C++ without a real C++ compiler front end! Not that 
hard for D, though.)