Re: tops (or another way) to semi-parse obj-c code

[Ben Dougall]

On Saturday, April 3, 2004, at 09:51  am, Stefan Urbanek wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2004-03-29 20:36:48 +0200 Ben Dougall <bend@freenet.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > hiyer,
> > i've asked this in a few places now -- not had too much luck.
> > i want to semi-parse some objective-c code in a syntax aware manor  
> > the command line tool tops seems possibly capable of this but i'm not  
> > completely sure if it'll do what i want. i want to do various  
> > manipulations, but the main one is to swap a specified variable name  
> > for another word without messing with any other uses of the searched  
> > for word (such as method names).
>
> concerning the ObjectiveC parsing framework, AFAIK there is no such  
> available (at leas no opensource one). However, there are several  
> projects taht are doing partial parsing of an ObjectiveC code. From  
> those I know they are GNUstep applications, such as Gorm (GNUstep's  
> Interface Builder) or CodeEditor.app (for syntax highlighting).
>
> There is kind of specification for such framework at GNUstep wiki  
> pages:
>
> http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/FrameworkWishList
>
> The idea behind the framework was to be able to share objectinve c  
> parsing between applications. Another idea was to be able to do  
> refactoring (and variable/class renaming), as you suggest. But that's  
> all - noone has started to write it.
>
> Even this email was not much help for you, it reports the state of the  
> thing you are asing for.

thanks for the reply.

the most useful thing that i've found (although i'm not completely sure  
how useful it is because i don't really understand it at the moment and  
haven't gone into it yet) is this yacc file from gcc:  
<http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/DevToolsDec2002/gcc3- 
1175/gcc/c-parse.in>. obviously there is an objective-c parser in gcc  
somewhere and i think that's it or at least part of it.

and tops doesn't look too good for what i want unfortunately. it  
doesn't allow me to change variable names in the source for example.  
not that i can see in any case.

thanks, ben.