With all of the threads about little languages, parsing and similar such, I was just thinking about a kind of parser generator. The idea features a pet theme of mine, use code to write code. It would work something more or less like the following.

  1. Create a quick and dirty spec to begin with.
  2. Write a herd of regexs to parse same.
  3. Test until reasonable satisfied.
  4. Wave magic wand, i.e. use magicstuff.pm or whatever to generate 'C' version of decompiled regexes.
  5. Create loadable modue from same
  6. Weave back into target language, repeat as needed.

Oddly enough, I think I've already written the decompiler part—odd becuase I wrote to generate automatic inline documentation for code that uses regexes enough to need explanation. It occured to me that if I can generate documentation, then I should also be able to generate code. There aren't that many templates needed and with a little tweaking, I could make it pretty much automagicall. Write the XS, Makefile.pl and the rest all based on a list of definitions.

So, what think you all?

–hsm

Come to think of it, it wouldn't have to be 'C', could be any language where the result could be linked back to Perl, could be optimized assembler—heh, heh!

In reply to Parser Generation and Regeneration by hsmyers

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