Re: [Caml-list] what do I need to know to understand camlp4

[Michael Ekstrand <michael@elehack.net>]

On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 16:56 +0200, ben kuin wrote:
> Could someone give any idea how I can begin to understand how to write
> simple camlp4 extensions?

Shameless self-plug, but I wrote a blog post this summer about my
experience figuring out how to do it.  I provide a walk-through and
explanation of a minimal syntax extension which adds lazy list pattern
matching support based on Batteries.  The URL:

http://www.elehack.net/michael/blog/2010/06/ocaml-syntax-extension

I do assume a basic knowledge of parsing context-free grammars, but a
generic tutorial on parsing with a tool such as Yacc can fill in that
gap.  The Wikipedia article[1] may also be helpful.

Once you've lept the hurdle of figuring out what pieces you need to
write and build a syntax extension, the remaining tricky part is to
figure out what pieces of the grammar you need to extend to accomplish
your objective.  For that, I consult the definition of the OCaml parser
in Camlp4OCamlParser.ml in the OCaml source tree.

- Michael

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar

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