Re: Formal description of Org files

[Olivier Schwander <olivier.schwander@chadok.info>]

Le 15 Apr 2011 14:31, Nick Dokos a écrit:
> Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > If one goal of such a formal description of Org-mode would be to parse
> > text Org-mode files into an abstract syntax tree ...
> > 
> 
> I think this should be the starting point: what are the goals for all this?
> Providing a formal description in EBNF is one thing. Preparing an attribute
> grammar for input into a specific tool is another (and probably an order of
> magnitude - or two - harder) - what would the resulting parser(s) be used for?
> 
> Clear(er) answers to these questions should go a long way towards figuring out
> what specific tool(s) should be used - or whether it's at all necessary to
> worry about that.

The primary goal I see for such a formal description is to provide a
specification that third party parsers are supposed to respect. Writing
a real parser may be too much project specific and difficult to
generalize in a way usable by the community.

During the development of neo[1], I was confronted to the need of
defining what is an org file (actually, what is an headline, a todo
keyword, a tag, a drawer, a timestamp, etc) and determining what is the
expected output of a parser.

Maybe the most appropriate format for such a description would be free
text, letting parser developers choosing between context-free grammars,
regexps or whatever they want ( with a bunch of example org files for
reference and tests).

Regards,

Olivier

[1] I am just discovering this thread