From: Clifford Heath <no@...>
Date: 2008-01-30T07:04:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Treetop Email Parser

Phil Tomson wrote:
> On 1/29/08, Matt Mower <matt.mower@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Would I be alone in finding Objective-C support useful?
> An Objective-C backend for TreeTop would rock!

Once the basic framework for multiple output languages was there,
it wouldn't be hard to add. At the moment there's a Ruby builder,
but the interface doesn't allow a simple substitution of another
builder. A fairly simple cleanup would fix that. I'd also like it
to emit more meaningful names, like "rulename_result" and
"rulename_sequence" instead of "r1" and "s0".

> That said,  looking at the output from tt it seems that it's very much
> oriented towards Ruby's dynamicity -  extend is used extensively, for
> example.
> Not saying an Objective-C backend would be impossible, though....

Not at all. The code blocks would have to be emitted into new classes
for Java. For C#, they'd be partial classes. I don't know Obj-C, but
I doubt it's harder than those two.

Clifford Heath.