OpenToken project announcement

[dennison@telepath.com]

(I'm sorry for the waste of bandwidth, but I meant to make this its own
topic, not to bury it in the bottom of another thread.)

I'd like to announce the initial release of the token analysis packages I
developed at my work to the Ada OpenSource community, under the aegis of the
OpenToken Project. A webpage for the project is at
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/OpenToken/OpenToken.html ).

The goal of the project is to further the development of the reusable
exensible token analysis packages, and eventually to provide similar packages
to support parsing activites.

The initial version of the pacakges is downloadable from the web page in
gnu-zipped and Windows zipped forms. It currently contains only a small readme
file for documentation, and generic tokenizer objects for character sets,
identifiers, integer literals, real literals, keywords, and line comments.

In the next release I hope to provide a simple example, and perhaps more
documentation and recognizers. Any help anyone can provide in these areas
(particularly new recognizers) would be greatly appreciated, of course.

I'd also like to have input from people who have experience in writing
compilers on the algorithms used in this package. Until I can generate some
benchmarks against lex-generated analyziers, that is my only way of
evaluating the advisability of the approach I took for the analysis engine.
But I do realize such folk tend to be incredibly busy.

I'd like to take a moment to list the motivations that caused this release:

FlightSafety's decision to release this code seemed to be based on (this is
*not* an official company statement!):
  o  The possibility of increasing the utility and stability of the package
without dedicating its own manpower to do so.
  o  A percieved moral obligation to put something back into the OSS community
that they derive so much benifit from.

My reasons for wanting to release this code as OSS are:
  o  The ability to use this highly useful tool no matter where my career may
take me.
  o  It seemed like a good project to base my master's thesis on. :-)

--
T.E.D.

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