[ spirit-Feature Requests-710743 ] EBNF parser

Feature Requests item #710743, was opened at 2003-03-27 06:33
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Category: Interface Improvements (example)
Group: Next Release (example)
Status: Open
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Jonathan de Halleux (pelikhan)
Assigned to: joel de guzman (djowel)
Summary: EBNF parser

Initial Comment:
I would be interresting to make a EBNF to Spirit parser.


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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Date: 2006-05-01 11:49

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http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-14977.pdf

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Comment By: Jonathan de Halleux (pelikhan)
Date: 2003-04-04 06:54

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I had forgotten that a tree was built by the spirit parser.

I'm planning to:
    - first, parse the ebnf structure and let spirit build a tree,
    - second, explore the tree and render to spirit grammar.

I've got one small problem: tree stuff does not work on VC6,7... 
and I get strange error with Dev-C++... I'l have to wait for vc7.1

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Comment By: Jonathan de Halleux (pelikhan)
Date: 2003-04-03 08:30

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Is the preliminary document describing EBNF sufficient ?

I was thinking about first transforming to xml and then render to 
Spirit. Do you have a preference for a xml parser/generator ?
I don't think it is part of boost ?



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Comment By: joel de guzman (djowel)
Date: 2003-04-03 08:18

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This will be really cool! I suggest using the ISO/IEC 14977:
1996(E) syntax.



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Comment By: Jonathan de Halleux (pelikhan)
Date: 2003-04-02 23:14

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I've started to work on that. And in fact, there is no defacto EBNF 
standard. I'll try to get the ebnf specification working and see 
what can be done from there.


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Comment By: joel de guzman (djowel)
Date: 2003-04-02 18:57

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If you look at the preface, if fact, original Spirit was
designed to bootstrap a dynamic parser that takes in EBNF
productions as strings. This is similar to your intent. 

What you want in fact, if I'm not mistaken is a source to
source converter where EBNF is converted to Spirit/C++. Yes
this is very doable. However, there are problems:

There is practically no defacto EBNF standard. There's an
ISO standard ( ISO/IEC 14977: 1996(E). ), but I know of no
parser that accepts ISO-EBNF. Typically, you'll still have
to massage the code from one EBNF format to another.

An approach might be to accept different EBNF source
grammars (possibly using a command line switch) which will
then be converted to Spirit. This imight be a good idea,
albeit tedious to do. Will it be worth it? Yes.
Unfortunately, there's so much to do that such a facility
might be considered as low priority.

Unless someone wants to contribute such an EBNF parser, this
might be far away into the horizon.

--Joel

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Comment By: Jonathan de Halleux (pelikhan)
Date: 2003-03-30 09:49

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About the idea:
----------------------

The idea is to have a tool to create a repository of grammars 
for Spirit.

In the introduction, you give, as an example, the method to 
transform a EBNF grammar file to a Spirit inline code.

Maybe this could be done by a parser that reads EBNF and 
transforms it to Spirit code. Of course, the challenge would 
be to make it sufficiently clever to avoid infinite recursion, 
etc... I do not see it as a "do it all" solution but rather a 
solution for transforming rapidly a EBNF grammar to Spirit: 
first you use the parser to roughly transform the EBNF to 
spirit code and then you customize it with semantics, etc... 

There are a lot of EBNF files available and generaly you can 
find it for any programming language. With this EBNF parser, 
adapting a EBNF file to Spirit would be much easier.

About how to do it:
---------------------------

That's an open question that I haven't addressed now. I've 
seen that EBNF specification contains the EBNF grammar. 
This could serve as a starting point to building the parser.

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Comment By: joel de guzman (djowel)
Date: 2003-03-29 23:29

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Tell me what you have in mind. There are many ways to do this.

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