digitalmars.D.announce - Mono-D v0.4.9 - Rough formatting capability
- alex (14/14) Jan 21 2013 Hi everyone,
- F i L (2/2) Jan 21 2013 Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did
- alex (3/5) Jan 21 2013 I use it rarely either - but some others asked whether I could do
- mist (3/8) Jan 22 2013 Lack of auto-formatter was the reason I stopped using Mono-D some
- Bruno Medeiros (16/30) Jan 24 2013 That's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive!
- Jacob Carlborg (6/19) Jan 24 2013 How about reusing the one in VisualD, it's written in D? Sure it's a bit...
- Bruno Medeiros (14/33) Jan 25 2013 If I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD
- Jacob Carlborg (6/17) Jan 25 2013 I didn't say anything about porting :) I was suggesting you integrate
- alex (6/9) Jan 25 2013 I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface
- Jacob Carlborg (4/9) Jan 25 2013 It should provide an C interface, then it can be connected to anything.
- alex (2/14) Jan 25 2013 Why not wrap dmd's front-end?
- Jacob Carlborg (5/6) Jan 26 2013 The problem with the DMD frontend is that it's not made to be used in on...
- Rainer Schuetze (11/18) Jan 26 2013 COM is the natural choice when interfacing native code on Windows with
- alex (7/33) Jan 26 2013 Concerning completion server...why not a completion server? :D -
- alex (16/22) Jan 26 2013 Some additional thoughts:
- Rainer Schuetze (8/29) Jan 26 2013 That's actually what the Visual D semantic server process does.
- alex (18/66) Jan 26 2013 Lol.
- Bruno Medeiros (13/28) Jan 29 2013 Ah, fair enough. Yes, that could be an approach, although I dread a bit
- Jacob Carlborg (4/14) Jan 29 2013 Hehe, yeah, it's kind of the chicken and egg problem.
- Paulo Pinto (3/41) Jan 24 2013 Are you making use of JavaCC or ANTLR?
- Bruno Medeiros (35/75) Jan 25 2013 No, I thought I was going to initially, but the more I explored it the
- Paulo Pinto (12/106) Jan 25 2013 Thanks for the lengthy reply.
Hi everyone, No, the entire formatting engine is NOT finished yet. :P Anyway I've created a good compromise solution between releasing stuff early and having a fairly nice formatting result: I just let the indenting engine calculate the indents of all lines of the code - and fix all the incorrect indents afterwards. It works quite fast & reliable(?) - I hope it won't throw very often + you don't have to worry about resetting your code to an earlier state via [Ctrl+Shift][Z] Indenting only parts of the code is possible either! - So you don't have to worry about your entire code getting messed up probably ;) More info http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com Issues: https://github.com/aBothe/Mono-D/issues
Jan 21 2013
Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did like that).
Jan 21 2013
On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:32:38 UTC, F i L wrote:Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did like that).I use it rarely either - but some others asked whether I could do this - and now there it is :)
Jan 21 2013
On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:35:11 UTC, alex wrote:On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:32:38 UTC, F i L wrote:Lack of auto-formatter was the reason I stopped using Mono-D some time ago :) Awesome update, good luck with this!Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did like that).I use it rarely either - but some others asked whether I could do this - and now there it is :)
Jan 22 2013
On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 10:26:21 UTC, mist wrote:On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:35:11 UTC, alex wrote:Uhm..what is an auto-formatter in your eyes? Automatic formatting when you typed a '}' for instance? Or just the explicit possibility to let a program format your code? I mean, once the code got indented correctly, why should it ever be passed through a formatter again? Just to see that it's actually been indented correctly? Hmm..On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:32:38 UTC, F i L wrote:Lack of auto-formatter was the reason I stopped using Mono-D some time ago :) Awesome update, good luck with this!Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did like that).I use it rarely either - but some others asked whether I could do this - and now there it is :)
Jan 22 2013
I always define project code style policies in Eclipse code style settings and run auto-format (Ctrl+Shift+F) on new code always before commiting to ensure my nasty personal preferences have not slipped out of subconscious. It also converts all whitespaces consistently to match project settings and sometimes I forget to setup tab->space autoreplacement for external editors. In-place formatting is not that important for me. On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 14:44:15 UTC, alex wrote:On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 10:26:21 UTC, mist wrote:On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:35:11 UTC, alex wrote:Uhm..what is an auto-formatter in your eyes? Automatic formatting when you typed a '}' for instance? Or just the explicit possibility to let a program format your code? I mean, once the code got indented correctly, why should it ever be passed through a formatter again? Just to see that it's actually been indented correctly? Hmm..On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 21:32:38 UTC, F i L wrote:Lack of auto-formatter was the reason I stopped using Mono-D some time ago :) Awesome update, good luck with this!Thanks Alex, even though I don't use auto-formatting (I never did like that).I use it rarely either - but some others asked whether I could do this - and now there it is :)
Jan 22 2013
"alex" <info alexanderbothe.com> On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 15:54:46 UTC, mist wrote:I always define project code style policies in Eclipse code style settings and run auto-format (Ctrl+Shift+F) on new code always before commiting to ensure my nasty personal preferences have not slipped out of subconscious. It also converts all whitespaces consistently to match project settings and sometimes I forget to setup tab->space autoreplacement for external editors. In-place formatting is not that important for me.So that's the exact thing I'm trying to implement: To define an IDE- or project-wide formatting policy and let this control the code style. Let's see how far I can do it :)
Jan 22 2013
On 21/01/2013 21:14, alex wrote:Hi everyone, No, the entire formatting engine is NOT finished yet. :P Anyway I've created a good compromise solution between releasing stuff early and having a fairly nice formatting result: I just let the indenting engine calculate the indents of all lines of the code - and fix all the incorrect indents afterwards. It works quite fast & reliable(?) - I hope it won't throw very often + you don't have to worry about resetting your code to an earlier state via [Ctrl+Shift][Z] Indenting only parts of the code is possible either! - So you don't have to worry about your entire code getting messed up probably ;) More info http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com Issues: https://github.com/aBothe/Mono-D/issuesThat's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests... -- Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
Jan 24 2013
On 2013-01-24 14:12, Bruno Medeiros wrote:That's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests...How about reusing the one in VisualD, it's written in D? Sure it's a bit more work since it's not written in a Java compatible language but it might be worth it. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Jan 24 2013
On 24/01/2013 13:25, Jacob Carlborg wrote:On 2013-01-24 14:12, Bruno Medeiros wrote:If I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD easier to port to Java than D. But the descent.compiler experience (parser ported from DMD's parser) put me off that approach of porting from a parser in another language (although the VisualD parser might have less shortcomings than using the DMD parser since at least VisualD's parser is designed for IDE use). I want to have more control over the parser, and be able to effect my own changes in it (something tricky if you're porting - unless you give up the porting at some point, and just fork your own version and use ir from there) -- Bruno Medeiros - Software EngineerThat's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests...How about reusing the one in VisualD, it's written in D? Sure it's a bit more work since it's not written in a Java compatible language but it might be worth it.
Jan 25 2013
On 2013-01-25 13:01, Bruno Medeiros wrote:If I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD easier to port to Java than D. But the descent.compiler experience (parser ported from DMD's parser) put me off that approach of porting from a parser in another language (although the VisualD parser might have less shortcomings than using the DMD parser since at least VisualD's parser is designed for IDE use). I want to have more control over the parser, and be able to effect my own changes in it (something tricky if you're porting - unless you give up the porting at some point, and just fork your own version and use ir from there)I didn't say anything about porting :) I was suggesting you integrate the VisualD parser without porting it. That's why I suggested the one in VisualD and not the one in Mono-D. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Jan 25 2013
On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 13:43:46 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:I didn't say anything about porting :) I was suggesting you integrate the VisualD parser without porting it. That's why I suggested the one in VisualD and not the one in Mono-D.I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface between VisualD and D_Parser - this will probably happen via COM or so.. and I dunno anything about that technique. I just can make sure that the parser library is fully stand-alone, only depending on .net internals. Let's see :)
Jan 25 2013
On 2013-01-25 20:00, alex wrote:I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface between VisualD and D_Parser - this will probably happen via COM or so.. and I dunno anything about that technique. I just can make sure that the parser library is fully stand-alone, only depending on .net internals. Let's see :)It should provide an C interface, then it can be connected to anything. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Jan 25 2013
On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 20:34:28 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:On 2013-01-25 20:00, alex wrote:Why not wrap dmd's front-end?I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface between VisualD and D_Parser - this will probably happen via COM or so.. and I dunno anything about that technique. I just can make sure that the parser library is fully stand-alone, only depending on .net internals. Let's see :)It should provide an C interface, then it can be connected to anything.
Jan 25 2013
On 2013-01-26 01:23, alex wrote:Why not wrap dmd's front-end?The problem with the DMD frontend is that it's not made to be used in on its own, like in an IDE. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Jan 26 2013
On 25.01.2013 21:34, Jacob Carlborg wrote:On 2013-01-25 20:00, alex wrote:COM is the natural choice when interfacing native code on Windows with The semantic engine in Visual D is separated into another process and communicates with the IDE plugin through a number of "commands", just using this interface: https://github.com/rainers/visuald/blob/master/vdc/ivdserver.d . This can easily be mapped to C calls. There's also an implementation of that interface using D_Parser (https://github.com/rainers/visuald/tree/master/vdc/abothe), but it isn't complete yet.I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface between VisualD and D_Parser - this will probably happen via COM or so.. and I dunno anything about that technique. I just can make sure that the parser library is fully stand-alone, only depending on .net internals. Let's see :)It should provide an C interface, then it can be connected to anything.
Jan 26 2013
On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 08:22:39 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:On 25.01.2013 21:34, Jacob Carlborg wrote:Concerning completion server...why not a completion server? :D - I mean, it'll be launched as soon as VisualD launches..and then you can pipe-through commands etc. to interact like it's done the mspdbsrv already. That's imho even easier than using COM + can be driven even as a web server..which would be a real dream then!On 2013-01-25 20:00, alex wrote:COM is the natural choice when interfacing native code on The semantic engine in Visual D is separated into another process and communicates with the IDE plugin through a number of "commands", just using this interface: https://github.com/rainers/visuald/blob/master/vdc/ivdserver.d . This can easily be mapped to C calls. There's also an implementation of that interface using D_Parser (https://github.com/rainers/visuald/tree/master/vdc/abothe), but it isn't complete yet.I already suggested Rainer to make a native/non-native interface between VisualD and D_Parser - this will probably happen via COM or so.. and I dunno anything about that technique. I just can make sure that the parser library is fully stand-alone, only depending on .net internals. Let's see :)It should provide an C interface, then it can be connected to anything.
Jan 26 2013
On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 11:46:27 UTC, alex wrote:Concerning completion server...why not a completion server? :D - I mean, it'll be launched as soon as VisualD launches..and then you can pipe-through commands etc. to interact like it's done the mspdbsrv already. That's imho even easier than using COM + can be driven even as a web server..which would be a real dream then!Some additional thoughts: All you need to specify at startup are include paths and some completion options or so. Then while editing, you either pass changes incrementally or push the entire document content to the server. The server parses that document then and updates the internal parse cache. These parse caches will be used for completion then. As you request e.g. the completion window to open or some tooltip info, you just pass the module name, the caret location and a command to the server - it'll answer then with all the items that shall be shown in the completion list or in the tooltip box. Furthermore, stuff like indenting and formatting could be interfaced, too - just push the document content, and it'll pass you back all changes to do OR the complete document. What do you think about this idea?
Jan 26 2013
On 26.01.2013 13:09, alex wrote:On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 11:46:27 UTC, alex wrote:That's actually what the Visual D semantic server process does. Syntax highlighting and indenting are done in the plugin, though. These don't need anything more than lexing so far and must be fast. Specifying import paths and compile options isn't so easy, because you can have different options for different projects in the solution, meaning the same file might be even used with different settings. That's also one of the points where integration of D_Parser is kind of brittle.Concerning completion server...why not a completion server? :D - I mean, it'll be launched as soon as VisualD launches..and then you can pipe-through commands etc. to interact like it's done the mspdbsrv already. That's imho even easier than using COM + can be driven even as a web server..which would be a real dream then!Some additional thoughts: All you need to specify at startup are include paths and some completion options or so. Then while editing, you either pass changes incrementally or push the entire document content to the server. The server parses that document then and updates the internal parse cache. These parse caches will be used for completion then. As you request e.g. the completion window to open or some tooltip info, you just pass the module name, the caret location and a command to the server - it'll answer then with all the items that shall be shown in the completion list or in the tooltip box. Furthermore, stuff like indenting and formatting could be interfaced, too - just push the document content, and it'll pass you back all changes to do OR the complete document. What do you think about this idea?
Jan 26 2013
On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 12:28:11 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:On 26.01.2013 13:09, alex wrote:Lol.On Saturday, 26 January 2013 at 11:46:27 UTC, alex wrote:That's actually what the Visual D semantic server process does.Concerning completion server...why not a completion server? :D - I mean, it'll be launched as soon as VisualD launches..and then you can pipe-through commands etc. to interact like it's done the mspdbsrv already. That's imho even easier than using COM + can be driven even as a web server..which would be a real dream then!Some additional thoughts: All you need to specify at startup are include paths and some completion options or so. Then while editing, you either pass changes incrementally or push the entire document content to the server. The server parses that document then and updates the internal parse cache. These parse caches will be used for completion then. As you request e.g. the completion window to open or some tooltip info, you just pass the module name, the caret location and a command to the server - it'll answer then with all the items that shall be shown in the completion list or in the tooltip box. Furthermore, stuff like indenting and formatting could be interfaced, too - just push the document content, and it'll pass you back all changes to do OR the complete document. What do you think about this idea?Syntax highlighting and indenting are done in the plugin, though. These don't need anything more than lexing so far and must be fast.Isn't there any integrated lexing done by the VS editor component? MD as well as #develop provide simple syntax definitions. But well, semantic type highlighting..yeah, this could be an issue - whereas..this process takes only 1 ms or so in D-IDE, so this shouldn't be a problem.Specifying import paths and compile options isn't so easy, because you can have different options for different projects in the solution, meaning the same file might be even used with different settings. That's also one of the points where integration of D_Parser is kind of brittle.This wouldn't be a problem: There already is a strict separation of global (phobos, tango, vibe.d) and local (project, project-specific include) module sets in the parse cache. As I already said, changes to single documents could be passed to a document 'mirror' in the completion server immediately. Wait, the same file might be used with different settings? Hehe, there actually are no settings for parsing and code completion. Anyway, why should two projects make use of two files? Even if, this wouldn't be any reason to turn mad - the AST was just stored in two parse caches then, so no problem at all :)
Jan 26 2013
On 25/01/2013 13:43, Jacob Carlborg wrote:On 2013-01-25 13:01, Bruno Medeiros wrote:Ah, fair enough. Yes, that could be an approach, although I dread a bit the thought of having to interface D data to Java through a C API... it might work though if one is carefull and manages to keep the interfacing data simple enough (and leave the complex stuff in their own language realm). But to be honest, the main reason that keeps me from that approach, is that I feel I'm far more productive with Java than with D at the moment. Mostly because not of the language itself, but the excellent IDE semantic functionality, and debugger functionality, that Java has available. So yeah, kinda of a bootstrapping problem. :) -- Bruno Medeiros - Software EngineerIf I was going with that approach I likely would rather port the MonoD easier to port to Java than D. But the descent.compiler experience (parser ported from DMD's parser) put me off that approach of porting from a parser in another language (although the VisualD parser might have less shortcomings than using the DMD parser since at least VisualD's parser is designed for IDE use). I want to have more control over the parser, and be able to effect my own changes in it (something tricky if you're porting - unless you give up the porting at some point, and just fork your own version and use ir from there)I didn't say anything about porting :) I was suggesting you integrate the VisualD parser without porting it. That's why I suggested the one in VisualD and not the one in Mono-D.
Jan 29 2013
On 2013-01-29 13:34, Bruno Medeiros wrote:Ah, fair enough. Yes, that could be an approach, although I dread a bit the thought of having to interface D data to Java through a C API... it might work though if one is carefull and manages to keep the interfacing data simple enough (and leave the complex stuff in their own language realm). But to be honest, the main reason that keeps me from that approach, is that I feel I'm far more productive with Java than with D at the moment. Mostly because not of the language itself, but the excellent IDE semantic functionality, and debugger functionality, that Java has available. So yeah, kinda of a bootstrapping problem. :)Hehe, yeah, it's kind of the chicken and egg problem. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Jan 29 2013
On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 13:12:31 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:On 21/01/2013 21:14, alex wrote:Are you making use of JavaCC or ANTLR?Hi everyone, No, the entire formatting engine is NOT finished yet. :P Anyway I've created a good compromise solution between releasing stuff early and having a fairly nice formatting result: I just let the indenting engine calculate the indents of all lines of the code - and fix all the incorrect indents afterwards. It works quite fast & reliable(?) - I hope it won't throw very often + you don't have to worry about resetting your code to an earlier state via [Ctrl+Shift][Z] Indenting only parts of the code is possible either! - So you don't have to worry about your entire code getting messed up probably ;) More info http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com Issues: https://github.com/aBothe/Mono-D/issuesThat's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests...
Jan 24 2013
On 24/01/2013 15:11, Paulo Pinto wrote:On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 13:12:31 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:No, I thought I was going to initially, but the more I explored it the less I was up for it. This is what I wrote in the DDT forum some time ago: " At the moment I'm still just on an exploratory phase: learning more about ANTLR, how it generates code, I looked a bit at Gyula's ANTLR grammar code, but I am also looking into the possibility of writing a handwritten parser. In particular, some interesting reads: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6319086/are-gcc-and-clang-parsers-really-handwritten http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/17824/should-i-use-a-parser-generator-or-should-i-roll-my-own-custom-lexer-and-parser It's a bit hard to get a good opinion on this though, because the shortcomings they mention for parser generators (bad error messages, difficulty to do error recovery), apply mainly to certain types of PGs, like LR ones, but not the LL or PEG ones (like ANTLR), which are good at error reporting&recovery. But still, can handwritten parsers be significantly better at error reporting&recovery than LL/PEG parser generators? Hum... " But the more I was trying ANTLR and reading about it, the more I got the impression it was a huge abstraction that added a lot of complexity (in learning and understanding), but didn't actually save you that much effort. I mean, sure, if you just want to recognize a language, it saves a lot of effort vs. writting a custom parser. But to actually generate an AST, proper source range, DDoc comment annotations, parse trickier rules, handle error recovery properly, and make sure the parser is efficient, it seemed like a daunting task. I felt I would have to become an ANLTR expert (read the book, and the theory behind it) for something that seemed trivial and fairly easy to do without a parser generator. This is by no means a fully-fledged, 100% assured opinion, but it's what I got so far. Comments and ideas are welcome. But from what I read from stackexchange a lot of other people seem to share this opinion (that it's better to write hand-written), although I don't know which kind of context and requirements they are comming from. -- Bruno Medeiros - Software EngineerOn 21/01/2013 21:14, alex wrote:Are you making use of JavaCC or ANTLR?Hi everyone, No, the entire formatting engine is NOT finished yet. :P Anyway I've created a good compromise solution between releasing stuff early and having a fairly nice formatting result: I just let the indenting engine calculate the indents of all lines of the code - and fix all the incorrect indents afterwards. It works quite fast & reliable(?) - I hope it won't throw very often + you don't have to worry about resetting your code to an earlier state via [Ctrl+Shift][Z] Indenting only parts of the code is possible either! - So you don't have to worry about your entire code getting messed up probably ;) More info http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com Issues: https://github.com/aBothe/Mono-D/issuesThat's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests...
Jan 25 2013
On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 12:31:12 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:On 24/01/2013 15:11, Paulo Pinto wrote:Thanks for the lengthy reply. I was just curious. Hand written parsers tend to better on error messages, that is true. Personally I tend to use parser generators, but since university days I just do DSL kind of languages anyway. The main problem is when you start parsing things that require a lot of backtracking or do not fit well in a LL(k) grammar description. -- PauloOn Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 13:12:31 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:No, I thought I was going to initially, but the more I explored it the less I was up for it. This is what I wrote in the DDT forum some time ago: " At the moment I'm still just on an exploratory phase: learning more about ANTLR, how it generates code, I looked a bit at Gyula's ANTLR grammar code, but I am also looking into the possibility of writing a handwritten parser. In particular, some interesting reads: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6319086/are-gcc-and-clang-parsers-really-handwritten http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/17824/should-i-use-a-parser-generator-or-should-i-roll-my-own-custom-lexer-and-parser It's a bit hard to get a good opinion on this though, because the shortcomings they mention for parser generators (bad error messages, difficulty to do error recovery), apply mainly to certain types of PGs, like LR ones, but not the LL or PEG ones (like ANTLR), which are good at error reporting&recovery. But still, can handwritten parsers be significantly better at error reporting&recovery than LL/PEG parser generators? Hum... " But the more I was trying ANTLR and reading about it, the more I got the impression it was a huge abstraction that added a lot of complexity (in learning and understanding), but didn't actually save you that much effort. I mean, sure, if you just want to recognize a language, it saves a lot of effort vs. writting a custom parser. But to actually generate an AST, proper source range, DDoc comment annotations, parse trickier rules, handle error recovery properly, and make sure the parser is efficient, it seemed like a daunting task. I felt I would have to become an ANLTR expert (read the book, and the theory behind it) for something that seemed trivial and fairly easy to do without a parser generator. This is by no means a fully-fledged, 100% assured opinion, but it's what I got so far. Comments and ideas are welcome. But from what I read from stackexchange a lot of other people seem to share this opinion (that it's better to write hand-written), although I don't know which kind of context and requirements they are comming from.On 21/01/2013 21:14, alex wrote:Are you making use of JavaCC or ANTLR?Hi everyone, No, the entire formatting engine is NOT finished yet. :P Anyway I've created a good compromise solution between releasing stuff early and having a fairly nice formatting result: I just let the indenting engine calculate the indents of all lines of the code - and fix all the incorrect indents afterwards. It works quite fast & reliable(?) - I hope it won't throw very often + you don't have to worry about resetting your code to an earlier state via [Ctrl+Shift][Z] Indenting only parts of the code is possible either! - So you don't have to worry about your entire code getting messed up probably ;) More info http://mono-d.alexanderbothe.com Issues: https://github.com/aBothe/Mono-D/issuesThat's a lot of continuing nice work coming out from there, impressive! BTW, something I've been meaning to ask. I see that in Mono-D you've developed a hand-written D parser. How long did it take you to write that? Did you test it extensively or not so much? I'm embarking on that same task in Java, for DDT, and wondering how long it will take to build a quality parser. So far, it doesn't seem writing the actual parser will take that long, but writing extensive tests for it is seeming exceedingly complicated (or just lengthy and time-consuming). I'm usually a big proponent of TDD, but when writing a lot of tests starts to take a lot of time compared to the code being tested (in this case, maybe 1.5 times the effort/time of the code being tested), I'm not so certain it's the right call to spend so much time writing tests...
Jan 25 2013