Announcing Dryverl: an Erlang-to-C binding compiler

[Romain Lenglet]

Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
> I apologize for barging into the discussion, but I don't agree
> with this statement.

You are welcome.

> What you say is true for xslt because it describes the grammar
> as directly as a parse tree.

s/XSLT/XML Schema/

> If using a "normal" domain specific language, the definition
> will of course include such duplication of definitions, but
> this need not be visible at the syntactic level.
>
> Something like (very simplified)
>
>     expr -> 'decode' decode_input : {decode, '$2'}.
>     expr -> 'encode' encode_input : {encode, '$2'}.
>
>     decode_input -> 'map' map_d: {decode_input, '$2'}.
>
>     encode_input -> 'map' map_e: {encode_input, '$2'}.
>
>     map_d -> id_ref_d: ['$1'].
>     map_d -> id_ref_d ',' map_d: ['$1'|'$3'].
>
>     map_e -> id_ref_e: ['$1'].
>     map_e -> id_ref_e ',' map_e: ['$1'|'$3'].
>
>     id_ref_d -> 'decode_op': decoding.
>
>     id_ref_e -> 'encode_op': encoding.
>
>
> will work nicely as intended.

Alright, it works. :-)
It is sort-of equivalent to my XML Schema: XML element names are 
like lexical tokens, and XML element types are like the names of 
non-terminals in this case.

> Whether this is better or worse than xslt is completely
> another issue.

s/XSLT/XML Schema/

> Note: the C language isn't context-free either and yacc
> grammars can handle it. The semantic checking has only to be
> moved as a separate step after the parsing. I agree it's not
> very nice, but it works.

That was my point against some of ROK's statements: using XML 
Schema, you can express semantic rules that are checked by the 
parser.

-- 
Romain LENGLET