Re: Some more elisp aspects: Reader and documentation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> writes:

>>> 2) Write a seperate elisp reader, possibly in Scheme (but could be C
>>> as well if that's important for performance).  This helps us keep
>>> "both" readers clean and seperate, but all has to be done from ground
>>> up and the code is probably slower (when written in Scheme).
>>
>> This sounds like the best option to me.  You could use SILex to build
>> the lexer (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~dube/) and `(text parse-lalr)'
>> for the parser.
>
> Hm, ok, I'll look into those.  On the other hand I guess that Lisp has
> such a simple syntax that hand-writing some recursive-descent parser
> may be an equally good option?  Well, I'll simply give it a try!

Well, yes, you may be right.

> But it seems that the LALR parser generator is part of guile-lib, and
> will introduce that as a new dependency for Guile;

Actually it's already in `master', because it's used for ECMAScript.
I'd need to be made part of the official API, though.

> do you think that's ok?  (Haven't checked how SILex works and if it
> may introduce dependencies.)

SILex generates a source file containing the lexer, so there's no
additional run-time dependency.  Guile's tarball could come with the
generated file, such that end-users don't need to have SILex installed.
For convenience, it may be helpful to have SILex in the repository,
though (that's what Guile-RPC does).

Thanks,
Ludo'.