On Thursday, October 21, 2010 15:01:21 Walter Bright wrote: > As we all know, tool support is important for D's success. Making tools > easier to build will help with that. > > To that end, I think we need a lexer for the standard library - > std.lang.d.lex. It would be helpful in writing color syntax highlighting > filters, pretty printers, repl, doc generators, static analyzers, and even > D compilers. > > It should: > > 1. support a range interface for its input, and a range interface for its > output 2. optionally not generate lexical errors, but just try to recover > and continue 3. optionally return comments and ddoc comments as tokens > 4. the tokens should be a value type, not a reference type > 5. generally follow along with the C++ one so that they can be maintained > in tandem > > It can also serve as the basis for creating a javascript implementation > that can be embedded into web pages for syntax highlighting, and > eventually an std.lang.d.parse. > > Anyone want to own this?
You mean that you're going to make someone actually pull out their compiler book? ;) I'd love to do this (lexers and parsers are great fun IMHO - it's the code generation that isn't so fun), but I'm afraid that I'm busy enough at the moment that if I take it on, it won't get done very quickly. It is so very tempting though... So, as long as you're not in a hurry, I'm up for it, but I can't guarantee anything even approaching fast delivery. - Jonathan M Davis
