Greets,
I've been using a version of Charmonizer with KinoSearch for a little
while now. No public release, and it's a work in progress, but the
basic approach seems to be sound.
I bailed on the idea of implementing Charmonizer as a domain-specific
language with a full-on custom parser. Too much hassle, when another
idea presented itself...
Dave had suggested that we might consider using C to write C.
However, we agreed that embedding C code in C string literals was
just too dang gnarly.
The solution: a source filter.
Here's a description taken from the README file:
<readme>
METAQUOTE UTILITY
Charmonizer is a C program which writes C code. Writing C from
C is
ordinarily quite awkward, because when you try to embed more
than a line
or two of C source code inside C string literals, things get
ugly fast.
To get around this problem, Charmonizer uses a source filter.
In the
"real" Charmonizer source code, longer code fragments are
surrounded by
METAQUOTE tags instead of literal double quotes.
char hello_source[] = METAQUOTE
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello, world.\n");
return 0;
}
METAQUOTE;
These source files are run through the "metaquote" utility -- which
transforms everything between paired METAQUOTE tags into
concatenated
string literals. The result is hideous but valid C.
</readme>
Technically, Charmonizer ain't C -- it really is a domain-specific
language which compiles to C. But this is a lot more straightforward
than the syntax in the original proposal. And unless you're writing
custom modules and you want to take advantage of metaquote, you just
write your main configurator app in C and #include post-filter
Charmonizer files.
http://www.rectangular.com/svn/kinosearch/trunk/charmonizer/
http://www.rectangular.com/svn/kinosearch/trunk/charmonize.c
Sound good?
metaquote is implemented in C, BTW.
Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com/
