Re: Proposal Accepted for GSoC

[Diab Jerius]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 8:22 AM, Al Pacifico <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Matthias and Vishal-
>
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 11:43 AM, Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > Hello Vishal,
> >
> > Vishal Gupta <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > > My proposal for the project " Parse Makefile.am using abstract syntax
> > > tree" has been accepted and I am excited to start working on the same.
> >
> > Congrats!
> >
> > > The community bonding period will be till 14th May. As discussed in
> > > the proposal, I will be working on improving my perl skills and
> > > understanding the Automake's Code. Some queries about that :
> > >
> > > 1) Good resource for studying Perl and important concepts required for
> > > completing the project. A short task of 4-5 days would be great for
> > > testing my knowledge of perl and quantify my progress.
> >
> > Like I said to Matthias, Perl comes with an extensive set of manpages
> > which consist of tutorials and reference manuals.  ‘perlintro(1)’ is a
> > good entry point.  The “Learning Perl” book by Tom Phoenix and Randal
> > Schwartz is a nice introduction to Perl.
> >
> > You will need to get familiar with perl references which is a somewhat
> > advance topic in order to build recursive structure for the AST.
> >
> > To learn Perl I think it is important to have an interactive environment
> > ‘perl -d -e ''’ is useful for that.
> >
>
> I'd like to add to what Mathieu wrote regarding becoming familiar with Perl.
>
> I have used Perl off and on extensively over the past 20-odd years and
> there are eight Perl books on my bookshelf.  I'm guessing that you will be
> using its object-oriented features for this project, and looking over my
> second edition of "Learning Perl," it has no coverage of OO features,
> although they are mentioned on pages 195-197.
>
> My recollection is that I learned most about Perl's OO features from Damian
> Conway's "Object Oriented Perl"
> <https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Perl-Comprehensive-Programming/dp/1884777791>
> which
> is available as a used book very cheaply.  Probably the chapter on OO
> features in the hefty O'Reilly title "Programming Perl"
> <https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Perl-Unmatched-processing-scripting/dp/0596004923>
> (AKA "the Camel book") would do just as well.  If I were to own one Perl
> book, it would be the Camel, but it is pricey.
>
> -Al
>
> >
> > > 2) How to go about understanding the Automake code .
> >
> > The first step is to compile it from the Git repository and report
> > unclear points.  I encourage you to get familiar with Automake from a
> > user perspective by creating build definitions for some dummy C programs
> > and libraries by following the Automake manual which is nicely written.
> >
> > > 3) Any other task required to be completed during the community bonding
> > period.
> >
> > I think, it is important that you get more familiar with Git usage and
> > good practices before the coding period.  There is a lot of resources
> > online and particularly a great book freely available:
> >
> >   https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
> >
> > > As discussed in the proposal that I will be having my exams from 8th
> > > to 15th May, so I will try to complete the work before that time.
> >
> > No problem.
> >
> > If you have any question or difficulty in your discovery, you can ask on
> > the #autotools IRC channel on Freenode or directly to me (my pseudo is
> > ‘mthl’).  I am not sure about your actual timezone (mine is UTC+2) but
> > if you are from India don't expect me to available too soon in the
> > morning.  :-)
> >

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned in this discussion, but
http://modernperlbooks.com/ is the de-facto overview of, well, Modern
Perl.  It's what all of the cool kids use these days. It has a very
good introduction to modern OO in Perl.  (And the online book is
free.)

In terms of parsing Makefile.am's, CPAN (https://metacpan.org) is
awash with parsing frameworks.

The most powerful is Marpa
(https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Marpa-R2/pod/Marpa_R2.pod).

There's the old favorite Parse::RecDescent
(https://metacpan.org/pod/Parse::RecDescent).

There's also Pegex, which is a combination of Parsing Expression
Grammars and Regular Expressions
(https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Pegex/lib/Pegex.pod)