Re: Lilypond BNF

[Carl Sorensen]

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 11:56 +0200, Juergen Reuter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> FYI: I just googled for "syntax diagrams" and "generate" and found this 
> page:
> 
> http://www.research.philips.com/technologies/syst_softw/elegant/
> 
> They offer a GPL'd tool for automatically generating syntax diagrams (in 
> PostScript format) for a given (E)BNF.  There is a paper that documents 
> this tool: 
> http://www.research.philips.com/technologies/syst_softw/elegant/downloads/Diagrams.pdf
> 
> Greetings,
> Juergen

This is a cool tool!  I apparently didn't find it in my googling because
I was searching for Yacc, or Bison.

As I looked at the Elegant pages, it appears to me that Elegant is not
syntactically compatible with Yacc/Bison.  Therefore, switching to
Elegant would require a complete rewrite of the parser.  This is a
bigger job than I am personally up for.

The benefits of this tool include being able to automatically generate
both "true" BNF and graphical syntax diagrams.  However, I didn't see in
my relatively quick perusal any facility for including comments in the
BNF output. 

Thanks,

Carl
-- 
Carl Sorensen <address@hidden>