Because two major concurrent projects isn't enough I also keep getting distracted by other random issues. This week I decided to look into parsing. I've written parsers before, even a very simple parser generator. I've also used Boost.Spirit a few times (and I'd love to learn how to use it better, maybe something to get distracted by some other month). This time however I decided to forget everything I new and research from scratch. It's funny what you can learn when you do this. I didn't research in too much depth, but it didn't take me too long to come across Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) and Packrat parsers, neither of which I remember coming across before.
I'm not completely sold on Packrat parsing - it looks great for simple parsing but not so good for more complex parsing due to the complexity of changing state - but Parsing Expression Grammars seem really useful. I quickly hacked together a simple recursive descent parser for mathematical expressions, along with a generator using an equivalent grammar. After getting the parser working I spent a bit of time working on error handling, for which some of the details mentioned in the Packrat parser paper I was reading were very useful. All-in-all it was an interesting diversion and next time I need a parser I'll have a slightly better foundation to start from.
Finally, I present you with The Source Code Challenge(TM). If you remember (assuming anyone actually reads this drivel regularly) a few weeks ago I was freeing up hard drive space to install Medieval II: Total War. I vaguely wondered at the time how much of my hard disk was filled with source code. This week I decided to find out. The Source Code Challenge(TM) is for you to do the same. The target to beat is 27 505 files (.c, .cpp, .h & .hpp) or 537 175 479 bytes (512MB!). Admittedly a large proportion of that come from six compilers with attendant include folders, plus boost, but it's still an awful lot of source code!
?nigma
