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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2017 10:57:15 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: Re: Writing a scanner and parser in Ada
From: Yves Cloutier <yves.cloutier@gmail.com>
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Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:49640
Date: 2017-12-25T10:57:15-08:00
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On Monday, December 25, 2017 at 12:08:38 PM UTC-5, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On 2017-12-25 17:35, Yves Cloutier wrote:
> 
> > Yes my Perl version does all that in 1 pass, but one of the things I
> > want to do is have it generate for different targets. Groff was my
> > initial one. I wan't creating any kind of AST but I think I'll want to
> > do that in my rewrite to make things simpler and allow for generating
> > for other targets like maybe Latex, or epub etc...
> 
> You don't need AST for that. Simply define code generator interface 
> (tagged) with abstract operations generating pieces of code. For each 
> target have a derived type implementing these operations. Pass a 
> class-wide Target object as a parameter to the parser. If the actual is 
> of Groff_Target the result is groff etc.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

haha I'm quite new to Ada so most of what you just explained I don't quite understand.  But will get there. Baby steps.

I see that you created a SNOBOL-like pattern matcher.  This looks really useful for processing text.