On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:57 AM, David Green <david.gr...@telus.net> wrote:
> I agree that being able to parse data structure would be *extremely* useful. > (I think I posted a suggestion like that at one time, though I didn't > propose any syntax.) There is already a way to parse data -- Signatures, > but not with the full power that grammars can apply to text. I'm certain I'm not the first person to think of it, especially since the link that Moritz provided came so close. Just to get a sense of the scope of it, I've been playing around with the code tonight. Modifying PGE to handle the syntactic changes was trivial, but of course, it's the semantic shift of allowing the input to a regex to be a data structure other than a string that will take some digging around and re-tooling (many assumptions need to be re-visited like what "pos" means in the context of a multi-level datastructure match!) I'll have another go at that tomorrow and see how much work it's likely to be, but I'm still thinking this is something to push forward into 6.1, and not try to hold up any work on 6.0 for. I suppose if I want to be nice to others, I should come up with a patch against the STD as well, since there's now an active project using it to compile code.
