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 fixed before other people try and use it. None of these are major though, however when I went on to test the embedded ‘Helper’ application, used to quickly develop lexers and parser rules, I started coming across bigger issues. Although I’ve got a good error mechanism built into my parse rules, I’ve not does anything to catch these errors in the parser helper tool, and not finished the support for them in the generated PHP code. I also had another look at my template language, and realised that various breaking tests would be a lot easier to fix if the generated parser was stopping on these errors. It would be nice to get the template language working before revisiting the PHP code generation, but also nice to get the generated code catching these errors before doing more on the template language. I seem to have a circular dependency, but I think a bit of time spent fixing the temporary PHP generation will make progress on other things both quicker and easier, so that is what I’ll do first.
