Re: Re: software design clarification

On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 12:44:09AM -0400, Gilles J. Seguin wrote:
> > I know I've brought this up before, and apologies for providing
> > another distraction from, you know, actually writing said code... but
> > isn't this yet more reason to consider just integrating Elsa?  It's
> > 2-clause BSD, it already parses C++ well, Mozilla is investing heavily
> > in using it to build automated refactoring tools...
> > 
> > It's at, of course:
> >   http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~smcpeak/elkhound/sources/elsa/
> 
> an old project, we are not crazy, if the thing would work we would have
> used it since long time.
> 
> from documentation,
> «The template design is still somewhat incomplete.»,
> means can not used it if using template.

Yeah, I dunno -- just skimming the source there is clearly a bunch of
template support code, and 'cc_type.html' says that template support
is incomplete and that template instantiation should be added while
'design.html' appears to document their template instantiation
support... I can't really tell what the status is.  (NB, it looks like
the URL above is out of date; the code is still being updated and the
latest version is at the cubewano.org site I linked later.)

In any case, isn't the question more about what is easiest to fix?
>From the outside, it looks like Elsa is parsing huge programs that
have clobbered every other alleged C++ parser (aside from the 3
C++ compilers), and supporting fancy data-flow analysis and accurate
symbol resolution, while you guys are still working on just getting
symbol tables going.  But, obviously, I have not looked into these
things as closely as you guys.

> In brief, parsing C++ require backtracking that is it, that is all.

Huh?  Are you claiming that the GLR-parser approach used by Elsa
cannot be made sufficient for C++ code?  That sounds incorrect to me,
but I'm not an expert.  Really I am just guessing what your sentence
means, though.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words
you have to hear the music