From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-25T05:44:48+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Syntax 0.7.0

Sam Roberts wrote:

>>Ripper basically is Ruby's integrated Ruby parser. It will invoke 
>>callbacks for every kind of construct it encounters.
> 
> Hm, look like it returns whitespace, and other non-syntactic elements.
> Good.  Does it return end-of-line, and is it just a lexer, or is it a
> parser, too?
> 
> I.e., does
> 
>   MyParser.new.parse("class Foo; Bar = 4; end;")
> 
> tell me that the Foo is a class name, and Bar is a constant name, or do
> I have to deduce that?
> 
> If so, maybe i'll try.

The above produces quite a few events. Here's a few which seem to be 
relevant to you:

on__ASSIGN: ["="]
on__assignable: [:Bar, nil]
[...]
on__assign: [nil, 4]
[...]
on__class: [:Foo, nil, nil]
on__set_line: [nil, 1]

It's probably best to try this out on your own.

> The rubyforge page makes it look as if it may be written in C based on
> ruby's parser, using lex&yacc. If so, that would be sweet, because it
> might be fast.

I still think that it is build directly into Ruby and that it also comes 
with it. It reuses the same parser as Ruby and thus ought to be very fast.