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Re: RFC: Extracting the action transformation from the scanner
From: |
Akim Demaille |
Subject: |
Re: RFC: Extracting the action transformation from the scanner |
Date: |
Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:03:23 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110004 (No Gnus v0.4) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) |
>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:
> Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:
>> - It does introduce some code duplication.
> Yes, I think that's my biggest worry about this sort of thing.
Yeah, I understand, and I share your concern. But in this case there
is not too much duplication.
> If the refactoring results in a real win that users can see
> (support for Java, say?), then it might be worth this hassle;
> otherwise, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.
I have in mind the fact that Perl people complain that $ and @ have a
hardwired meaning. But I'm not specifically aiming at this right now,
it just seemed nicer to separate concerns.
> M4 sounded like a nice idea at first, but in retrospect perhaps we
> should have left well enough alone. People have submitted
> replacements (one based on Python, another on Scheme) but I'm not
> sure they're enough of an improvement to be worth the hassle.
> Perhaps it'd be better to drop the postprocessor phase entirely; it's
> nice in some respects, but I'm afraid it's turning out to be more
> trouble than it's worth.
I strongly disagree here. I agree programming with strings is hard
enough, M4 managing to beat TCL on its own battle field on this
regard, but returning to some ad hoc treatment would be a serious
regression.
We really want to be able to iterate, to change tokens, to generate
function signatures etc. Having to perform that from the C engine is
quite wrong IMHO.