On 1/31/2012 1:48 AM, Erik Christiansen wrote: >> > 3) tools that allow one to treat the grammar as an engineering object, >> > e.g., view it, analyze it, manipulate it (refactor, group, etc), and >> > extend it. This area was an arid desert the last time I did any related >> > technical work. > Well, BNF does that, and being more lexically inclined than visually, > I'll admit to doing that sort of stuff for fun.
I'm uncertain about your phrase "BNF does that". Are you "doing that sort of stuff" by hand (the way, I'm sure, that Tom Kramer created and checked his production rules for RS274/NGC) or using software tools that can track your work, keep versions, do the sorts of things I mentioned? I don't mean with something like CVS or git, which can track anything because they know nothing, but with a tool that knows the elements of BNF notation. These were totally lacking---my so-called arid desert---when I was working in data-exchange standardization. I'm strongly lexically inclined as well (my wife says it's because I'm strongly left handed; my dad, in turn, used to joke I'm left handed because I was dropped on my head as a baby). Still, it's a bore doing all that "bookkeeping" in text, even if the text is maintained on a computer. If your are using software tools, what tools are they? > If you do it right, often with tools you've written yourself, then tools > are the jet fighter of software development. I totally agree. We used them all the time in the development of software driven by information modeling. The STEP activity created its own cottage industry for tools supporting the EXPRESS modeling language, as has also happened on a much larger scale in the UML world. It's just that when it came to parser generation we had only the downstream tools like lex/yacc. We had to code the grammars by hand in a form acceptable* to the tools. Debugging the grammars was a painful process. > Yes. It's just the length of the journey, the path to be taken, and just > precisely where we stop, that's subject to clarification. Ah, yes, the famous stopping problem. Regards, Kent *sidebar rant: I noticed in a Google search that unnecessary diversity of BNF notations apparently continues. If the grammar of any size is maintained by hand then there is great reluctance to change downstream toolsets if doing so means restating the grammar. I came across a nice paper published last year by Vadim Zaytsev "BNF WAS HERE..." describing the development of a meta notation based on the analysis of 77 published grammars (contained in language standards, etc.). He concludes that their notation allows them to define most of the 42 variant syntactic notations. The result supports their development of automatic grammar recovery tools. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
