Re: Re: SQL Integration

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:39:54 +0100, Hans-Christian Holm
<hchrholm-f/vm7P8qpiNhl2p70BpVqQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Perhaps this wish should be expressed in a more general way: Could it be or
> is it possible to extend and customise Boo beyond macros, like defining new
> tokens, new syntax rules, custom IL generation etc? I'd like to see not only
> embedded SQL and XML processing like in Comega, but even embedded IL (like
> embedded assembly code in some languages). Could Boo eventually become some
> kind of a meta-language, a base for special needs so that you don't have to
> design a language and a compiler from scratch everytime you'd like a domain
> specific language? 

I think especially with the next all-boo version of the compiler,
plugging in optional services like this will be even easier.
See Rodrigo's notes on compiler profiles:
http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/bamboo/archives/000919_compiler_pipelines_and_compiler_profiles.html
See also http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/BOO-82

The only thing I wasn't sure about was dynamically changing parser
rules, but it looks like you can subclass ANTLR grammar files too:
http://www.antlr.org/doc/inheritance.html
Right now the ANTLR parser generates C# code, so I don't know if we
are eventually going to need to write a boo code generator for ANTLR.

Maybe if there are ANTLR grammars for SQL, XML, python, etc., we could
turn them into boo compiler plugins.