Re: Expression Parser

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article
<Pine.A41.3.96-heb-2.07.990729112145.104782E-100000@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.i
l>,
  Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, Jeffrey D. Cherry wrote:
>
> |Although it's not a parser, a good place to start would be the
OpenToken
> |page:
> |
> | http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/OpenToken/OpenToken.html
> |
>
> Since it seems I'll have to hack something up myself, I'll give this a
> clsoe look. From what i've seen it seems very nice.

I have used it for several different tasks here at work, and have found
it quite handy. But if there's something you could use that it doesn't
do very well, please tell me. That goes for documentation as well. Now
that my summer class is ending, I should have more time to devote to
developing it.

Parsing capability *will* be added in a future version.

Wow. This would come up on the week I took off to work on my AI project.
:-(

> I'll take this opportunity to share an observation. Ada is designed
> for reuse and for good SE practices. Since the latter discourage many
> would be Ada hackers, we end up with less code to reuse.
> Of course bad code shouldn't be reused, but the more code out there
> the greater the chance some of it will be good.

I don't really think that's entirely accurate. I figure there just
aren't as many folks around who know Ada. Considering that, there really
are a great deal of reusable Ada packages floating around. If anything,
I'd say the language encourages it *more* than C, because it is much
more portable.

For instance, as part of my AI project I gave a go at porting the
open-source game Empire to cygwin32. It already has #ifdef's and make
rules in to support gcc on several Unix platforms and MSVC++. So both
the compiler and the platform were already supported, just not together.
After 8 hours of work on a Saturday that could have been much better
spent playing with my kids, I finally gave up the ghost. I ended up
having to hack it into a DLL so I could link it with Gnat.

OpenToken, on the other hand, compiles as-is with no source changes on
at least 3 different Ada compilers using 2 different OS'es that I know
of. I have yet to receive a report of a portability problem.

Its really sad to think of the amount of effort the world wastes in C
porting...

--
T.E.D.


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