From: Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>
To: emacs-orgmode <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Formal description of Org files
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:43:45 +0530 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <BANLkTimwWzdxuNAY=rMQNzppr9a-KKnggQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1803 bytes --]
>
> Hi,
>
> I have a question.
>
> At FOSDEM, someone asked me if there was a formal description of the
> structure of Org files, in some language
> that would be the input for a parser (or parser generator?) so that Org
> file could be easily parsed.
>
> Unfortunately I did not catch the name of the format description language
> that could be
> used for something, not did I catch the name of the person who talked to
> me.
>
> Can anyone help out here? Let me know what language to use, and maybe help
> work on such a formal description? I
> think it would be useful to have....
>
Something like yacc (bison, antlr etc) are all 'executable BNF' languages.
When they work they can make the code an order of magnitude smaller and
development/programming correspondingly easier.
That said I see a couple of hitches.
1. Grammatical handling of languages is based on the assumption of a clear
and well defined set of tokens/lexemes. I expect this would be harder in
org than the typical programming languages for which yacc etc are used. For
example in most 'normal' languages there are comments and strings. These
involve some non trivial handling which is entirely hidden from the grammar
by being pushed into the lexer.
2. Parsing a program is done for the full program as a rule (IDEs are the
exception to the rule). Sensible parsing of program fragments, where the
fragmenting could be quite arbitrary, is a bit of a research problem
3. As I see it, the main declarative tool (somewhat akin to grammars) that
org uses is regular expressions. IOW org is written with re-s strung
together with programming logic ie vanilla elisp. An alternative that stays
within the regular framework (not using the heavy guns of context free
parsing) may be ragel: http://www.complang.org/ragel/
Rusi
[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2058 bytes --]
next reply other threads:[~2011-04-15 17:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 41+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-04-15 17:13 Rustom Mody [this message]
2011-04-15 17:27 ` Formal description of Org files MidLifeXis at PerlMonks
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-09-21 12:10 Gustav Wikström
2014-09-21 12:43 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2014-10-02 8:28 ` Samuel Loury
2014-10-02 17:03 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2014-10-04 19:49 ` Gustav Wikström
2014-09-26 8:12 ` Eric S Fraga
2014-09-26 12:53 ` Grant Rettke
2014-09-26 20:51 ` Eric S Fraga
2014-10-04 19:41 ` Gustav Wikström
2014-10-06 14:22 ` Samuel Loury
2011-04-15 7:58 Carsten Dominik
2011-04-15 8:54 ` Rainer Stengele
2011-04-15 10:57 ` Carsten Dominik
2011-04-15 11:50 ` Peter Frings
2011-04-15 12:05 ` Carsten Dominik
2011-04-15 15:25 ` Jambunathan K
2011-04-20 11:57 ` Olaf.Hamann
2011-04-15 12:58 ` Christian Egli
2011-04-15 13:42 ` Peter Frings
2011-04-15 13:52 ` Filippo A. Salustri
2011-04-15 14:20 ` Wes Hardaker
2011-04-15 17:29 ` Eric Schulte
2011-04-15 18:31 ` Nick Dokos
2011-04-20 12:37 ` Olivier Schwander
2011-07-15 18:07 ` Marcelo de Moraes Serpa
2011-07-16 16:56 ` Bastien
2011-07-16 17:09 ` Nick Dokos
2011-07-16 17:12 ` Bastien
2011-07-16 18:21 ` suvayu ali
2011-07-16 18:43 ` Nick Dokos
2011-07-17 23:14 ` Eric Schulte
2011-07-18 9:30 ` Christopher Witte
2011-07-18 23:32 ` Bastien
2011-07-18 21:02 ` Marcelo de Moraes Serpa
2011-07-18 21:03 ` Marcelo de Moraes Serpa
2011-07-18 11:04 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2011-07-18 23:35 ` Bastien
2011-07-19 6:16 ` Jambunathan K
2011-07-24 18:58 ` Bastien
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.orgmode.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to='BANLkTimwWzdxuNAY=rMQNzppr9a-KKnggQ@mail.gmail.com' \
--to=rustompmody@gmail.com \
--cc=emacs-orgmode@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).