> But perhaps I should write a C-language parser in J?

That's ambititous.  And would be quite a boon to the community.

> I could see this being useful in the context of cd and

Agreed, and also a good example of J, not to mention a propoganda piece.   

>  extracting values from C's include files. 

We do already have  ~system\main\defs\build\sym2ijs.ijs  but that requires a
C compiler, which is completely different from your proposal (for one thing,
Windows machines do not usually have a C compiler).  OTOH sym2ijs knows
what, e.g. "long" means according to its host system.  

On that note:

   *  sym2ijs needs to be run through
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Scripts/Fixargs
   *  Why can't I find this script in http://www.jsoftware.com/svn/base/  ? 
Is that
       repository kept up to date?  I can't ever seem to find what I want in
there.

>  (Do you know of any concise references describing C's syntax?)

Not off the top of my head, but I did some googling.  Besides the normative
reference, which isn't concise, most parsers I found (e.g. in CPAN) depended
upon a C compiler.  Which defeats the purpose of the project.  

Here's one I found implemented in ANTLR and Java, 

   http://www.antlr.org/grammar/cgram/grammars

In particular, you'll probably want to look at this file:

   http://www.antlr.org/grammar/cgram/grammars/StdCParser.g

(scroll past all the Java until you get to the translationUnit identifier;
the grammar starts there).  Note the caveats at the top of the file, though.

I'll keep looking, there has to be another programming language out there
that implemented a C parser, just for the sake of it.

-Dan
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