Re: The Swift Programming Language: what is our position towards this?

[Gregory Casamento]

Derek,

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 5:53 PM, Derek Fawcus <dfawcus+lists-gnustep-discuss@employees.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 05:09:15pm -0400, Gregory Casamento wrote:
>
> I have been looking into this language for the last few days.   I haven't
> had a chance to play with it yet, but I have read the technical reference
> on it (available as a free ebook from Apple, complete with the BNF grammar
> in the back).

I suspect that the language is (to some extent) still in flux,  and that
one might as well wait until Autumn (when OSX 10.10) is supposed to release
before expending too much effort.  i.e. see if once Swift becomes 'hardened'
Apple release the LLVM front end source.

​I'm not holding my breath for this.  I HOPE they release it, but I sincerely don't think they will.  Then again, I have to ask myself if they didn't have the intention of releasing it why would they release the grammar?

​

However,  there is no harm in generating a parser for the language,
and it may be independently useful.  From the quick glance I've had
through the book,  I suspect a parser shouldn't be too hard.

​A parser should be pretty easy, in fact.  Given that the grammar is given in pretty clear BNF it should be something that is easy to use to create a parser for the language for any given popular grammar generator from flex/lex/antlr to any others.

​

.pdf

​Greg​

--
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)
http://www.gnustep.org
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