[pro] Is cl-yacc going to cut it?

[Cyrus Harmon]

I've been very pleased with cl-parser-combinators. Not sure what you're trying to parse, but it's pretty flexible and powerful. I've used it for parsing a printed representation of molecules, SMILES strings, and have found it to be a pleasure to work with.

Cyrus

On Feb 3, 2011, at 10:33 PM, Matthew D. Swank wrote:

> I suppose this is only marginally related to common lisp, but everything
> I'm talking about is written in common lisp.
> 
> I use cl-yacc for a lot of parsing, but one thing that has always seemed
> harder than it needs to be is writing lexers to feed it. One thing that
> I've found helpful is the creation of a custom lexer for each parser
> state by making the action table entry for that state available to the
> lexer. This provides the terminals the parser is looking for, and
> narrows the tokens the lexer has to look for at each step.  However,
> this means I am also maintaining my own fork of cl-yacc. 
> 
> It seems (from my admittedly limited search) that this is not a common
> modification of yacc.  Before I start bugging the maintainer about my
> changes, I want to know: am I abusing yacc? 
> 
> I do like the separation between low level tokenization the higher level
> symbol parse, but is there another general parsing technique, available
> as a lisp library of course, that either works at a lower level than
> yacc usually does or allows the lexer to access more context about the
> parse? 
> 
> Matt
> 
> _______________________________________________
> pro mailing list
> pro at common-lisp.net
> http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pro