Re: [Caml-list] Dypgen C++ grammar

[Taras Glek <taras.judge@shaw.ca>]

skaller wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 14:26 -0700, Taras Glek wrote:
>   
>> Hi Scott,
>> Why write yet another incomplete C++ parser? You can already get a very 
>> nice OCaml representation of a C++ program through olmar( 
>> http://www.cs.ru.nl/~tews/olmar/ ).
>>     
>
> Because last I looked, olmar doesn't work, and that's
> because Elkhound and Elsa, on which they're based, don't work.
> By that I mean, there are bugs. 
>   
Right, and you expect to write a C++ parser without bugs that will 
compile everybody's weird C++?

If something is complicated and has bugs, it's typically much easier to 
fix bugs than to write a competing library.
Elsa has an some interesting design decisions, but it's a well-written 
library, I don't expect to see another C++ parser parser of this quality 
anytime soon.
>   
>> If that doesn't suit your needs, why not point out the problems and 
>> maybe work together to solve them? 
>>     
>
> Elkhound and Elsa are both C++ programs, which creates 
> portability issues, and the team maintaining them refused 
> to cooperate with my requirements.
>   
I don't see why anyone would cooperate with "requirements".  I think 
between me, the olmar maintainer and the oink maintainers we can reach a 
solution that benefits everybody.
> My system Felix consists of an Ocaml based compiler,
> which generates C++ sources.
>
> I actually have a *fork* of Elkhound built in to the
> compile and run time system for generating parsers,
> but this doesn't apply to parsing Felix sources:
> I'm currently switching from Ocamlyacc to Dypgen as a
> parser.
>
> Frankly .. I want an embeddable Ocaml code: binding
> to a C++ built executable is tricky (you'd need to
> use some crud like XML as an interchange format),
> and it isn't extensible.
>   
Yes, XML stuff is elsa is a deadead, but the olmar approach is a good one.
> Using Frontc/Cil, which is *also* part of Felix,
> is much better -- I have already embedded part of
> the C parsing capabilities directly into the Felix compiler.
>   
There is a big step from C to C++. I think you are underestimating the 
difficulty of it. I don't mean to imply that you don't know C++ as even 
Stroustroup mentioned you by name in his recent report on C++. I'm just 
saying that it's a lot of work.
> The bottom line is that I want code written in Ocaml
> because I'm sooooo sick of portability hassles.. :)
>
>   
Wouldn't we all like that :)

Taras