I have a custom tool written in PHP that I use to manage references, associate them with local copies of pdfs of the papers, and build annotated bibliographies. When I wrote it I used the RefWorks Tagged format to import… Read moreVibe coding a parser
Ohm (ohmjs.org) is a parsing toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript that makes use of PEG grammars. Jeremy (my supervisor) suggested I look at a recent blog post, “Inside Ohm’s PEG-to-Wasm compiler“, which describes recent updates that have made it both… Read moreA quick look at Ohm
Last week I had my final “Annual Progress Review” (APR) of my PhD project, which went reasonably well. I went in with considerable trepidation because I was expecting to get a hard time over my lack of strong theoretical underpinning,… Read moreAnnual Review, and thoughts about generated code
This week I decided to have a look at the ‘workflow’ an end-user of my tools might use, and try and spot any gaps. I quickly found a few minor bugs and missing features in the IDE, which really need… Read moreReviewing code & planning next steps
I’ve been trying to recreate Alex Kladov’s implementation of the Pratt parser algorithm, described in “Simple but Powerful Pratt Parsing“, in PHP, to make sure I fully understand it. Kladov’s implementation is in Rust. There are also translations to Python… Read moreWriting source code for human readers
My usual approach to writing boring or repetitive code is to use generative programming, but there are other ways of getting source code generated, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve looked at two of these. A couple of… Read moreProgram Synthesis and AI: how do they compare with Generative Programming.
A few weeks ago my supervisor Jeremy, suggested that I should read through Guido van Rossum’s series of blog posts about PEG parsers. I’ve only just got round to starting reading them properly, but I think they’re going to be… Read moreLooking at Guido van Rossum’s PEG blogs (part 1)
I’ve spent most of the week trying to get rollback working in my parser rules, having thought that the bug I found while implementing look-ahead was the main issue. Unfortunately the problems are rather deeper than that, but this morning… Read moreLooking ahead, not rolling back.
My period of disruptions is hopefully coming to an end, with this blog and our other websites now hosted on a different hardware (though the same VM), and the electrical work all finished and tidied up. So, I’ve been managing… Read moreLanguage tools progress
Two weeks ago I felt I was making good progress on updating the two interpreters that are at the core of my PhD, but I’ve not made much progress since. First I was away for a week, visiting Sarah’s family… Read moreLots of little disruptions