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
In my last post I said that I would leave discussion of the testing section of Wąsowski and Berger’s[1] chapter on code generation to a separate blog post, Basically because it is very tricky subject and deserves quite a bit… Read moreTesting DSLs and Code Generators
I recently came across the book, “Domain-Specific Languages: Effective Modeling, Automation, and Reuse” by Andrzej Wąsowski and Thorsten Berger[1], and this provides a very useful overview of current standard practice. The chapter on code generation is of particular interest, as… Read moreLooking at the Code Generation chapter of Wąsowski and Berger (2023)
In my previous post, Turning data into code, I described the latest iteration of my template language, used to convert data-structure or AST produced by the parser into source code in the target language. At that time, I was updating… Read moreTesting and then updating my template language
This week I’ve been working on support for my output template language in my on-line IDE. The IDE itself is basically a fairly old version of dock-spawn-ts, combined with Microsoft’s Monaco editor, with my own framework and configuration language. To… Read moreTurning data into code
One of the nice features of my early regular expression based parsers was that it was easy to get data out by defining sub-matches in the rules. For example, to match the start of a class (using PHP preg_match syntax,)… Read moreAdding named matches to parser rules