Re: CEDET, DL & parsing thoughts (was Re: Release plans)

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Eric M. Ludlam wrote:
> This is in effect what is in CEDET/Semantic now but without the DL.  I
> had made a replacement for flex, but more Emacs Lisp centric, and
> David Ponce ported bison into Emacs Lisp directly.  This bison port
> supports incremental parsing, full parsing, reparsing, and is quite
> fast, though not nearly as fast as actual flex/bison/c code.
> 
> I would assume the concepts in David Ponce's wisent parser generator
> could be back-ported into Bison if desired.

So (if I understand currectly from the little I know about this), a bit
sadly, if there were sutiable flex and bison dlls these could be used
instead (if Davids specials were backported too) and would be quite a
bit faster.

This does not relate to the general question of loading dll:s. This is a
special case that I suppose Richard would approve. (I have no idea, but
I guess there are no flex and bison dlls availabe, or are there?)

However for new languages all this requires also writing language
specific bison grammars. Is this perhaps be a big job that just a few
person have insight in how to do?

> When I started, I really wanted to have a single generic parsing
> infrastructure that could do indentation, coloring, and tagging.

nxml-mode does that, but on its own of course.

> Once CEDET is merged into Emacs, I hope to examine some of the speed
> issues with others who know more what Emacs' internals are like.  (As
> an FYI, all of CEDET's papers should now be in order for this.)

Great. Then we can hope for that it is easy to get started using CEDET.

> Thanks
> Eric
>