Newbie technical/cultural question

Roel Wuyts rwuyts at vub.ac.be
Tue Aug 1 13:08:06 UTC 2000


 > 1c) TGen 
> There is a port of  a independant Lexer/Parser-Generator framework to
> Squeak
> called TGen.
> Search for the reference on:
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak
> (currently down)
>
>
> 1d) Programming Lab of the University of Brussels
> A researcher of the programming lab of the University of
> Brussels seems also  to be working this area.
> Search for  "Vrije Universiteit Brussel" in the mailing list archive and
> check what he is doing. He also maintains a Swiki-Web (I dont' have the
> URL at hand)

hmm, I guess I am that researcher (together with some other people at our
lab) :) We have declarative languages running over Smalltalk code, so we
needed parsers for these languages. For (what used to be) my language, I
used the ParserGenerator. The reason is that this is a tool from another
Smalltalk Environment (VisualWorks) in which I originally developed my
stuff. I ported it to Squeak, but I am still waiting for an answer of the
legal department whether I can release the port to the Squeak community or
not (the departure of Cincom's VisualWorks responsible for Europe did not
speed up this process...). The second option (which we are investigating
now) is to use TGen. It seems to have some benefits over the
ParserGenerator, but we are still investigating it.


> 2) Little Languages
>
>>The second part of my question is "What's the ST way of dealing with
>>little languages. Do you just build editors/inspectors instead?"
>
> I don't understand the question exactly. A utterance in a "little language"
> in this context is a sequence of characters. The lexer/parser builds a tree
> of objects.
> With the inspectors you can look at any node of the tree and ask
> the object to do something. Very convenient when developing.

I was wondering about the question too. First of all, I do not know what you
mean by 'little language'. Do you mean that it is not very different of
Smalltalk's synta ? Do you mean it is something *very* simple ? Second, 'Do
you just build editors/inspectors instead', I was wondering: 'instead of
what' ?

--
Roel Wuyts                    Programming Technology Lab
rwuyts at vub.ac.be              Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://prog.vub.ac.be/~rwuyts
Webmaster of European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org





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