Re: incremental lexing, parsing and semantic analysis

["Owen Fraser-Green" <owen discobabe net>]

Hi,

> Not really. A good deal of incremental lexing is handled by the batch
> lexer flex, and the incremental algorithm is pretty easy to follow.

Yes, I see that Harmonia or at least Ensemble was actually a collection of 
not just one analytic tool but a complete IDE (or SDE) comprising many 
different tools. I guess I should have got the hint from the name :)

> Any way, you can see that there is a lot of work to get to point of where
> Harmonia is. Working on an alternative is only justified by uncertainy of
> a release of Harmonia, or by techincal considerations after seeing a
> release of Harmonia. I am somewhat uncertain of release date, if they say
> months, it would probably be reasonable to expect a release by the end of
> the year. There is always a possiblity of not releasing at all. Another
> option for us is just completing the structural analysis part of gpf. I
> think this would be quite useful to have, even if the application writer
> would have to handle the semantic analysis (if required) him or her
> self. And it could probably be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

Yes, but I think many of the most useful tools would be based upon the 
semantic analysis tool. E.g.

- class builders which can modify user-edited documents
- other kinds of automated code generation tools
- visual analysis tools beyond simple class diagrams
- design-time tools to avoid symantic bugs

I suppose the hardest part is not just the analysis itself but the method 
of describing the semantics of different languages in a portable way so 
that new ones can be plugged in.

I would be interested hear your ideas on this side of things. I wonder if 
you'd mind creating a project in SourceForge where we can post articles and 
diagrams describing our ideas. If you like, I can do so this evening. Apart 
from anything else, I don't have GNOME CVS access :( Still, I think 
something like this could draw interest from other people if there're some 
web pages providing a more gentle introduction instead of just good old 
[Wa98].

I've had some other ideas on how gpf could be integrated into other tools. 
Basically, by exposing the API through bonobo and using BonoboEventSources 
to provide hooks between editors<--->gpf<--->tools.

Cheers,
Owen

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     Owen  Fraser-Green             "Hard work never killed anyone,
     owen discobabe net              but why give it a chance?"
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