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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 14:01:38 +0900 (JST)
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To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au
Cc: config@freebsd.org, chat@freebsd.org, hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp
Subject: Re: Kernel config metasyntax
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 28 Jan 1997 14:53:14 +1030 (CST).
	<199701280423.OAA07019@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
From: hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp (HOSOKAWA Tatsumi)
X-Mailer: mnews [version 1.19PL2] 1996-01/26(Fri)
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I don't want to flame about metaconfiguration base language because
the only thing I want is megtaconfiguration language :-).

The reason why I used yacc (but the list I send can't be compiled
because I haven't defined "controller" yet and it has a few syntax
errors...), is yacc is traditional, well-defined, and of coourse most
popular tool in designing languages on UNIX system.

And I've wrote a programming language translator and configuration
file parser in Perl, I felt that writing parser in Perl is easy, but I
felt the syntax is ambiguous and I doubt that there still remains very
simple errors in parser, and if I give the other files than I wrote as
samples, it will crash with unknown problems.

If many people says it's my fault and others do not, or it's Perl's
weakness and TCL is not, and writing parser in TCL is the better way,
I'll agree with writing parser in TCL of course.

I personally think that writing parser in yacc is not difficult, and I
wrote yesterday's example only in a few hours.  I also posted this
example in local hacker's mailing list and I got some advices.  I'm
fixing the problems and extending the syntax to incorporate requested
features.

--
HOSOKAWA, Tatsumi
hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp
hosokawa@jp.FreeBSD.org