Could someone educate me about what developers normally do when faced with having to create a lexer / parser / analyzer, say for clojure?
Why would people go with a canned solution, i.e. ready-made like soup out of a can, instead of by hand? E.g. why did the Counterclockwise Eclipse plug-in for Clojure use ANTLR , or why did in the Enclojure NetBeans plug-in for clojure use JFLEX? Why in clojure itself is there a reader made by hand and not using a canned generator? Am I naive in thinking one should do that by hand? Is this archaic thinking like those who still prefer building websites in HTML by hand? What's the advantage of doing that, say for clojure or in general? You still have to learn how a given generator works. And you may be limited by its design. What if you want fine combed control over how things are parsed to get, for example, sophisticated syntax based evaluation or inferences from cold code. E.g. like what Eclipse does for Java and their “Java Models” and exhaustive “Abstract Syntax Tree” nodes? I hope some of you could be generous enough to enlighten me. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
