Re: GSOC PEG project

[No Itisnt]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Michael Lucy <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> Thanks for the status report!
>>
>> Michael Lucy <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Files I've added so far:
>>> guile/modules/ice-9/peg.scm (I assume this is the right place to put this?)
>>
>> No, it should rather go under ‘module/language/peg.scm’, for the sake of
>> consistency with other compiler front-ends.  But see below.
>
> I'm not quite sure how this qualifies as a compiler front-end.  The
> functionality is mostly done (if unoptimized), so it shouldn't be too
> hard to turn it into one if that's what you want, but the original
> thought was just to build a compiling parser.  E.g.:
>
> (use-modules (ice-9 peg))
> (peg-find "'b'+" "aabbcc")
> --> (2 4 "bb")
>
> It does this by compiling "'b'+" into a lambda expression that then
> gets called on whatever the second argument is (the compilation is
> done at read-time).  So after macro-expansion, you have something
> like:
> ((lambda (...) ...) "aabbcc" ...)
>
> I was thinking of this as a sort of alternative to regular expressions
> that also does parsing, and I noticed the regular expressions module
> was in ice-9, so I put it there.
>
> Are you saying that the functionality that compiles "'b'+" to a lambda
> expression should be broken out into a language module that instead
> compiles it to TREE-IL code?  Am I fundamentally misunderstanding
> something?
>
>>
>>> PEG compiler: Works for all the grammars I've tested, no known bugs.
>>> Currently compiles to Scheme code rather than Tree-IL for debugging.
>>
>> It should rather compiler to tree-IL, like other front-ends, which is
>> very close to Scheme anyway.

I think you are both misunderstanding eachother:

- The PEG functions, useful in their own right, would be exposed as (ice-9 peg).
- There is an additional syntax for expressing grammars, so it can be
better used as a parser generator. That would go in as (language peg).

That's just my take though.

A personal whinge: I would like to be able to specify grammars in
Scheme, using macros as the sugar instead of a different syntax.

>
> Alright, I'll fix that.
>
> Noob question:
> The only way I can figure out to compile tree-il code is the rather ugly:
> (compile (parse-tree-il '(code here)) #:from 'tree-il)
> Is there a better way?

I'm not sure if you mean generating tree-il code or just compiling the
tree-il literals. If you want to generate it, use the record interface
from (language tree-il), if you want to compile the literals, that's
pretty much the way to do it. You can also do ,language tree-il at the
REPL to experiment with it.

Exciting stuff :) I can't wait to use this, maintaining my own
hand-written recursive descent parser is like watching a trainwreck in
slow motion.