Short consulting gig (programming with BISON/Flex)

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Dov and all,

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 3:12 PM, Dov Grobgeld <dov.grobgeld at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Another issue is that if you today need to write a parser in lex/yacc,
> then you probably made a bad decision along the way. There are today lots
> of well supported meta formats with excellent and well tested parsers, e.g.
> json, xml, yaml, config/ini, and your ROI is better spent integrating one
> of these than reinventing the wheel.
>
>
I agree that using meta formats is a good idea, but they are not too
suitable for Turing-complete programming languages, and some nonstandard
formats. There is still a case for using tokenisers and parser generators -
whether lex and yacc or more modern (and possibly better) ones such as the
ones I link to here -
http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/text-processing-tools/ . A
cautionary tale is that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Ant which
eventually became a Turing-complete XML based language whereas using
something like Ruby would have been better.

Regarding JSON parsers, see http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php .

Regards,

-- Shlomi


> (That said from someone who invented a meta format (and used lex/yacc)
> which I used for a number of years until I switched to using json. See:
> http://xnm.sourceforge.net/ .)
>
> Regards,
> Dov
>
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 1:16 PM, Eli Marmor <eli at netmask.it> wrote:
>
>> I see that the thread is still alive, so just wanted to say that it's a
>> de-ja-vu for me.
>> I've used to be a LEX/YACC master somewhere in the previous century (i.e.
>> the previous millennium...).
>> I not only used it for writing compilers, interpreters and parsers, but
>> also built a cool library based on LEX, as well as my own LEX version to
>> support 8 bit (it supported only 7 bits in the beginning...).
>>
>> I guess that it will not help anybody today, because many years have
>> passed, and I probably don't remember enough...
>> But it's nostalgic to remember these years...
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:42 PM, Aviram Jenik <aviram at jenik.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> We're looking for a consultant that can help us with a short gig to
>>> figure out why
>>> a piece of BISON/Flex code (used to render code into an interpreter)
>>> compiles under Debian 7 but not under Debian 9.
>>>
>>> The error is pretty vague so I rather not paste it here as it doesn't
>>> actually helps anyone who hasn't seen the full code.
>>>
>>> Any referrals would be appreciated; we're in Ra'anana industrial area.
>>>
>>> - Aviram
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Linux-il mailing list
>>> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
>>> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
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>


-- 
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/

You can never truly appreciate The Gilmore Girls until you've watched it in
the original Klingon.

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
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