From: "Andrew S. Townley" <ast@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T01:29:51+09:00
Subject: Using ruby for generic language parsing (or any language-specific	parsing libraries out there?)

Hi,

I've been looking at the various parser generator options for Ruby on
and off for a while now, and I was wondering if anyone had any
experience/recommendations on existing solutions.

What I'd ideally like to have is a set of pre-defined parser libraries
that defined an event-driven interface for handling productions.  This
would theoretically allow you to simply plug in your own business logic
into a robust, maintained and (hopefully) well-tested parser without
actually having to go though the tedium and pain of defining a bunch of
parsers yourself.

I'd like to be able to have something like this for SQL-92, Java and C,
with potentially other languages in the future.  I'm guessing stuff like
this has been developed for many of the IDEs out there that support
these languages, but I've never seen something as complete as what I'm
talking about via searching through google.

In the past, I've written parsers with Lex/Yacc, and I did do some work
a couple of years ago with rex & racc, but for anything as complex as
the above, I think rex/racc would be a) too time consuming/error prone
(I found it incredibly difficult to debug and diagnose problems and
generate reasonable error messages) and b) surely re-inventing the wheel
for the nth time, where n > 10,000,000,000. :)

I looked a bit at rparsec and treetop, but before I go down this path, I
was hoping to tap some of the community's collective wisdom for pointers
to similar initiatives.

Any information, suggestions or war stories would be most appreciated.

Cheers,

ast
-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast@atownley.org>
http://atownley.org