Shlomi Fish
Tue, 09 Apr 2002 02:26:46 -0700
On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 03:37:54AM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 01:30:18PM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > >
> > > > I'm not trying to sell them. I want to have a meeting where I can finally
> > > > get some questions about SCT answered face to face, and we discuss it. I
> > > > suggested that I teach Lex and Yacc, using Perl as a tool to teach them,
> > > > to fill some of the time and do something useful with myself. And it's a
> > > > demo not a lecture.
> > >
> > > If you put it that way - sounds great! Do you want to schedule it as
> > > part of the next meeting, or as a special meeting? either way, I'm
> > > game.
> >
> > I'd like it to be a dedicated meeting.
>
> How many of you club members will find such a meeting interesting? Can
> I get a show of hands? I'd like to know if we should schedule it as a
> special meeting, or as one of our regular club meetings. Thanks.
>
I think it should not be designated as a lecture. But it should be on
Monday, instead of one.
> > > > I'm not going to fill a two hour lecture explaining a technical tool such
> > > > as Lex and Yacc. O'Reilly can fill a book about those two, but I have more
> > > > exciting things to do. I just see it as an absurd thing that the SCT
> > > > configurator is still not written using Lex and Yacc and that those tools
> > > > can make it so much simpler and easier to understand.
> > >
> > > "If you build it, they will come"
> > > If you send us a patch, we'll apply it in a jiffie.
> >
> > OK. But my incenitive for giving a demo is also to make sure people learn
> > Lex and Yacc and how easy it is to use them. You don't really have to read
> > the Dragon book in order to use them. I know I grokked them, with only
> > having an intuitive conception of it.
>
> I grok them as well, although not well enough to use them
> proficiently, and I did read the dragon book (syscalltrack's filter
> parser required it). The point is not that we dont know how to use lex
> & yacc - the point is that we do not have the time to implement a
> working tool, again. We'd rather spend time improving the stability of
> the code (read: bug fixing) and adding new features.
>
I believe switching to Lex and Yacc will allow adding new features much
more easily. So it may be a good idea to invest a lot of time now, only so
one can later make sure that easy changes easy. It's like trying to
portably build a DLL without using GNU libtool. Doable, but much easier
with the latter.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
Knuth is not God! Knuth re-wrote TeX in C. God, also known as Joel
Spolsky, specified that such a thing was a bad idea. But then again, God
only claims to know about commercial software. So, Knuth may actually be
God.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org)
To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]