[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] Re: Beyond textual represenations...

[Constantie Plotnikov <constantine.plotnikov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Kaufman wrote:
> Regarding 2,   I'll admit that dynamically redefining grammars in specific 
> context sounds like an interesting idea.  But what problem does it solve? 
> How does Maya let one express something more elegantly or efficiently when 
> compared to vanilla java?   Perhaps more to the point, it sounds like the 
> new parsing techniques necessary to make Maya work were already figured out, 
> while it isn't at all clear that the user-interface for tools operating 
> direcly on an AST is well-defined.  And if the user ever changes source 
> code, you would need to parse to build your AST.  So you still have to write 
> a parser.
I might add that dynamic redefining grammars in specific context does 
not require giving up plain text. This was done in lisp, schema, and 
dylan. This was done in SGML/XML.

I have personally done in GTL project. Some obsolete demos are available 
at downloads section of http://sourceforge.net/projects/xc4j (you will 
need to download both files gtl-parser package contains doc-file with 
description of idea). Basically GTL is an attempt to enable SGML/XML 
like infrastructure for languages with programmer friendly surface 
syntaxes. XML is good for data because of infrastructure, but it is very 
poor as base for surface syntax of programming langauges. As it is 
possible to see in the demos, GTL is somewhat more freindly for 
programmers (not that was too difficult given XML langauge).

The published demos shows how grammar may be defined that builds 
structural and presentation ASTs. There is also a demo how presentation 
ASTs might be used to create syntax highlighted source as html.

The project has no funding so work is being done in periodic burst mode. 
The project pace so far is glacical.

I'm currently working on simplifying grammar definition language 
(current one is just EMF XMI) and generic GTL editor with syntax 
highlighting. That is why I'm interested in LDT and Webtools SSE 
projects. Both might simplify my work.

Constantine