Quasi-Literals & XML

[Monty Zukowski]

Just a note on this excerpt from your proposal:

Example: Defining DTD-Specific Grammars
The following grammar is written in a hypothetical variant of BYacc/Java or
ANTLR in which the actions are XML quasi-literal strings as supported by Step 1
above. (We would probably create an ANTLR wrapper.)

expr:
      mult
 |    a:expr '+' b:mult          { <apply><plus/>$a$b</apply> }
 |    a:expr '-' b:mult          { <apply><minus/>$a$b</apply> }
 ;

mult:
      pow
 |    a:mult '*' b:pow           { <apply><times/>$a$b</apply> }
 |    a:mult '/' b:pow           { <apply><divide/>$a$b</apply> }
 ;

pow:
      prim
 |    a:prim '**' b:prim         { <apply><power/>$a$b</apply> }
 ;


I know you have worked a lot on your quasi notation, but I found what might be
another source of ideas.  I recently stumbled across "bigwig"
http://www.brics.dk/bigwig/ which has a really nice framework for filling in
HTML templates with "gaps" -- the cool thing is that the html is embedded in the
language which can do flow control analysis to make sure all the "gaps" are
filled in before the document is sent back, and also make sure that the gaps are
not filled in twice.  The analysis isn't perfect but it is pretty cool.  I
haven't played with it much yet though.  Not that this has anything to do with
your proposal....

I like your proposal.  As far as the ANTLR stuff is concerned, it breaks down
into three parts:
 making the tree grammar work with xml
 making the tree grammar generate code in E or E-accessible Java
 translating the actions into quasi notation code

Antlr itself has the ability to plug in new code generators, so you may not have
to wrap antlr.  Instead just implement a different code generator and action
translator.  Since E can use java classes, you can use the existing java support
classes for streams and such.

I'll have to investigate DOM to see where there might be mismatch between it and
ANTLR's tree model.  I'd love to have this easy kind of tree transformation
notation in ANTLR.

Monty