(I'm asking this here because you share my view on how software should be. Please warn me if this is off-topic.)
I've always been a fan of using the unix text input and output to connect simple tools to achieve complex results, but I think there's a missing piece in the tool set: parsers. There are many situations where we need to deal with complex input, and tools like lex, yacc and relatives are helpfull. If such tools were to be used in shell script, the input of yacc would have to be an actual script instead of behaving like a template. yacc allows you to call complex functions to deal with interpreted data, but such scripts would have to call unix tools, maybe like printf to get output that could easily be parsed by sed or awk, or maybe tools to actually do actions. I've been thinking on how to implement such tool. Since I'm not a really good developer, I thought about asking people for sugestions. If you had such "shell yacc", how would you like it to be or behave? Would BNF be okay, or would you expect something different? Do you think mimicking lex and yacc as close as possible would be the best? Thanks, Maurício
