Re: [Caml-list] Custom lexer in Camlp4

[Jeremy Yallop <jeremy.yallop@ed.ac.uk>]

Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
> Excerpts from Jeremy Yallop's message of Tue Jun 24 16:30:23 +0200 2008:
>> Nicolas Pouillard wrote:
>>> Excerpts from Jeremy Yallop's message of Tue Jun 24 15:03:19 +0200 2008:
>>>> Is there a way to replace the default lexer in Camlp4?  I'd like to use 
>>>> (an extended version of) one of the OCaml grammars, but with a different 
>>>> lexer.
>>> You can rebuild (I mean functor application), your own camlp4 by giving
>>> another Lexer module. Basically you will have to copy/paste the short
>>> Camlp4.PreCast module (or a part of), by substituting Camlp4.Struct.Lexer
>>> by your Lexer implementation. That's fairly heavy but works.
>> Ok, I've built a slightly modified clone of PreCast.  What's the best 
>> way to persuade Camlp4 to use it?  The original PreCast seems fairly 
>> hardwired, e.g. in the Register module.
> 
> Hum, you can't you have to build your own camlp4 driver :(

Thanks, Nicolas.  That's useful to know.

The solution I've adopted for now is to change the default quotation 
expander to a function that just slots in my lexer before calling the 
original expander.  This means that I can use my custom lexical syntax 
inside the << >> delimiters and I can use those delimiters either around 
the whole program or around a particular term.  I think this'll be fine 
for my needs, although it would be nice to be able to customize the 
lexer that's used for regular code as well.

Jeremy