* Thomas Wittek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-06-07 15:05]: > I guess that the architecture/design for such a flexible piece > of software will be relatively complex.
All I can think of is “YAGNI”. Defining a syntax in a configuration file doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart move. You will either end up with a pretty rigid parser that caters to a class of only superficially different syntaxes, in which case diversity equals drawback because you have to cope with documents written in incompatible (though similar) syntaxes for no real gain (because all the syntaxes are similar in expressiveness). Or you will end up writing a parser interpreter whose “configuration” is really a more or less turing complete language. I’ve seen this sort of thing play out all too many times. And I’m pretty sick of little languages by now. (Hey, wasn’t that why Larry began writing Perl in the first place?) Let’s use Perl 6 Grammars to define syntaxes. We are just about to get this mindblowingly awesome tool for parsing; why insist on tieing our feet together and having to hop around like that? Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
