Jonathan Garnder said: > Well, if using something like PLY ( http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/ ) is > considered more Pythonic than writing your own parser and lexer...
Lex is very crude. I've found that it takes about half a day to organize your token definitions and another half day to write a tokenizer by hand. What's the point of the second half-day's work? My hand-written tokenizer returns everything (white space tokens, comment tokens) while Lex leaves these out. With a full token set you can use the tokenizer to color-highlight text in an editor, to emit an HTML version of source, process doc comments, etc. Python sports a tokenizer module, http://docs.python.org/lib/module-tokenize.html, but it's Python-specific. I'm working on a language for beginners, defined at http://www.MartinRinehart.com/posters/decaf.html (an 11"x17" poster-like display.) Decaf, designed before I'd even looked at Python, is surprisingly Pythonic. But not totally Pythonic. I want an array of Token objects, not a list of tuples, for example. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
