On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Bill Page wrote: | | On 12/5/07, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: | > ... | > for one thing, the parser still expects a stream of characters -- | > no amount of leading whitespace will change that. | | I agree. Conventional parsers process a "1-dimensional" stream of | characters. Something that is more than 1-dimensional can be | serialized so that it can be processed by such a parser.
But, in this specific case, the layout rule in the Spad Syntax amounts to nothing close to 2 dimension. It is purely a 1-diemensional thing. There isn't even anything that I would consider `serialization' -- and I've written a Boot parser and a Spad parser in C++ over the last 6 months in my spare time. | > It won't accept the ascii-art output of Axiom as valid input. | > | | A parser *could* be designed to accept this as valid input although I But, that parser won't be Spad parser. [...] | Handwriting as an input form for computers is this is something I'm more interested in -- and it certainly qualify as 2-dimensional syntax. And it isn't Spad syntax. Notice that, I distinguish Spad syntax from the Spad language. -- Gaby ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel
