• aelmetwaly (8/8) Oct 02 2004 Hi there,
• Deja Augustine (16/27) Oct 02 2004 The lexer takes the source file stored as one long string and splits it

"aelmetwaly" <aelmetwaly gawab.com> writes:

Hi there,
 I want to understand how the dmd frontend work. from the moment the source
file read into memory till its fed into the backend. what is the difference
between the lexer and the parser? what are the relevant classes in the dmd
source directory? How can one write a program to convert from d source into
xml datasource which could be used in, for instance, Intillisence editors
and code completions? Is there any sample code for a simple parser?
thanks.

Deja Augustine <deja scratch-ware.net> writes:

aelmetwaly wrote:
 Hi there,
  I want to understand how the dmd frontend work. from the moment the source
 file read into memory till its fed into the backend. what is the difference
 between the lexer and the parser? 

The lexer takes the source file stored as one long string and splits it 
up into tokens.  It also attaches information about each token such as 
what it represents (an identifier, a string, a numeric literal, etc...)

The parser then takes those tokens and constructs a syntax tree from 
them.  It converts a series of tokens (such as 'int' 'nVar' ';') and 
creates a VarDeclaration instance from them.

 what are the relevant classes in the dmd
 source directory? 

I'd study and learn the headers declaration.h, expression.h and 
statement.h at the VERY least.  It's a good starting point.

To give you a little hint, *Declaration are used to hold information 
about lines of code such as: "int var;" or "void func(...) {...}"

Expressions hold code such as "var = 5"  "3 + 5"

Statements are things such as "if(...) {...}" "while(...) {...}" "return 
...;"

 How can one write a program to convert from d source into
 xml datasource which could be used in, for instance, Intillisence editors
 and code completions? Is there any sample code for a simple parser?
 thanks.
 

Figuring that out is 90% of the work.

-Deja