From: Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@...>
Date: 2006-12-06T20:31:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Using Relax NG as a grammar

On 12/6/06, Vidar Hokstad <vidar.hokstad@gmail.com> wrote:
> It _is_ meant to be used for language specification, so that's why it
> looks suitable. It's only that it's meant for specifying grammars for
> languages using XML syntax, and so it's (rightly) very limited in terms
> of tokenization etc. which makes it unsuitable for more general
> languages like Ruby.

Ah, but after you're done tokenizing and have generated an abstract
syntax tree, what have you got? You could output the syntax tree into
Lisp S-Expressions, which are isomorphic to XML in a very real way. It
would, of course, be trivial if your source language was a Lisp
dialect. Relax-NG might be useful for defining the higher-level
semantics of a language, but the lower-level (and generally less
interesting) work of defining the syntactic details of the language
you need to do yourself.