CEDET

On 08/06/2010 08:19 AM, Gary wrote:
> Eric M. Ludlam wrote:
>> On 08/06/2010 05:01 AM, Gary wrote:
>>> Gary wrote:
>>>
>>>> I see that it seems to be traditional to ask about the current state of
>>>> cedet's php support about once per year. This time it seems it is my
>>>> turn.
>>>
>>> Nobody? :(
>>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The current PHP support is at a dead-end, with the original contributor
>> uninterested/willing to continue maintenance.
>
> You mean php mode (Aaron S. Hawley is the maintainer of that, and I
>   found him pretty responsive when I had a problem)? Or something within
>   cedet? If within cedet, where is it, please?
>
> I currently use nxhtml for my php editing needs (which includes some
> hacked up version of php mode AFAICT), but it really is only good for
> that - editing. It misses project based support and the like (which, I
> hasten to add, is fine - it is meant as an editing mode).

That is not what I was referring to.  I was only referring to the php 
support for CEDET's Semantic parser.  I'm sure the Aaron is doing fine.

>> There is a second smaller php parser on EmacsWiki, but I don't know what
>> state that is in.
>
> *scratches head* I don't see anything. Even google only finds some
> references to nxhtml:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site:emacswiki.org+"php+parser"&hl=e

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/semantic-php-simplest-grammar.by

>> Two folks from this list were interested in making a new version of the
>> php parser which could be come part of core CEDET
>
> Yeah, I saw that :) It's why I asked what the current status was :)
>
>> and I was hoping they would reply to your email.
>
> Me too :(
>
>> On the whole, there is no active maintainer that I know of.
>
> :(
>
> Do I remember correctly that one basically needs a BNF language
> definition as a starting point? Will EBNF suit?
> http://www.icosaedro.it/articoli/php-syntax-ebnf.txt seems to be mostly
> there, "only" missing a few fixes.

The parsers in Semantic can be made in lots of different ways.  One is 
to convert a bnf into a parser for the 'wisent' parser generator in 
Semantic, which is what the php support in cedet/contrib is.

Any future work would be best served by being developed by people who 
can sign papers with the FSF and assign copyright so that it can be 
included in core CEDET/Emacs.

Eric

I'm willing to look into this at least to gage the amount of work.
I may even do the work over a few months of time.

Eric, I see wisent-php.wy in contrib directory.
Would this be a good starting point?
As I recall semantic supports two different styles of grammar: bovine
and wisent.  Should we consider using bovine instead of wisent?
Is c.by the default one that semantic uses rather than wisent-c.wy?
Is this reason enough to consider bovine?

Gary, where can I find documentation on lexical analysis of PHP?
The lexical analysis code at the end of wisent-php.wy is really trivial.
Is it that simple?
I took a quick look at the php bnf.
It does not look all that different from others on first glance, e.g.,
python.
Also can you create sample php files for testing purposes?
What I have in mind is really trivial files with just a few lines of
most basic code and working your way to to include more complex syntax.
If you could provide these, that would help a lot.

I have not done any php programming other than reading about it a long
time ago.

I took a quick look at http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PhpMode.
I saw a mention of mmm (multiple major mode), which is a package that
I've used for many years, so this is encouraging.

Again I will take a look at at the minimum write up of the issues as a
texinfo file, and even try to implement it.



-----Original Message-----
From: Eric M. Ludlam <eric@...>
To: Gary <cedet@...>
Cc: cedet-devel@...
Subject: Re: [CEDET-devel] PHP support status?
Date: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:46:04 -0400

On 08/06/2010 08:19 AM, Gary wrote:
> Eric M. Ludlam wrote:
>> On 08/06/2010 05:01 AM, Gary wrote:
>>> Gary wrote:
>>>
>>>> I see that it seems to be traditional to ask about the current state of
>>>> cedet's php support about once per year. This time it seems it is my
>>>> turn.
>>>
>>> Nobody? :(
>>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The current PHP support is at a dead-end, with the original contributor
>> uninterested/willing to continue maintenance.
>
> You mean php mode (Aaron S. Hawley is the maintainer of that, and I
>   found him pretty responsive when I had a problem)? Or something within
>   cedet? If within cedet, where is it, please?
>
> I currently use nxhtml for my php editing needs (which includes some
> hacked up version of php mode AFAICT), but it really is only good for
> that - editing. It misses project based support and the like (which, I
> hasten to add, is fine - it is meant as an editing mode).

That is not what I was referring to.  I was only referring to the php 
support for CEDET's Semantic parser.  I'm sure the Aaron is doing fine.

>> There is a second smaller php parser on EmacsWiki, but I don't know what
>> state that is in.
>
> *scratches head* I don't see anything. Even google only finds some
> references to nxhtml:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site:emacswiki.org+"php+parser"&hl=e

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/semantic-php-simplest-grammar.by

>> Two folks from this list were interested in making a new version of the
>> php parser which could be come part of core CEDET
>
> Yeah, I saw that :) It's why I asked what the current status was :)
>
>> and I was hoping they would reply to your email.
>
> Me too :(
>
>> On the whole, there is no active maintainer that I know of.
>
> :(
>
> Do I remember correctly that one basically needs a BNF language
> definition as a starting point? Will EBNF suit?
> http://www.icosaedro.it/articoli/php-syntax-ebnf.txt seems to be mostly
> there, "only" missing a few fixes.

The parsers in Semantic can be made in lots of different ways.  One is 
to convert a bnf into a parser for the 'wisent' parser generator in 
Semantic, which is what the php support in cedet/contrib is.

Any future work would be best served by being developed by people who 
can sign papers with the FSF and assign copyright so that it can be 
included in core CEDET/Emacs.

Eric



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On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Gary <cedet@...> wrote:
>
> I've been distracted by project work and so on for the last few months,
> but recently came across
> http://www.program-transformation.org/PHP/PhpFront (LGPL) "a package you
> can use to generate, analyse, or transform PHP code". Would it be easier
> to write some glue between cedet and PFP-front than to write it all from
> scratch?

Unfortunately it looks like PHP-Front is not cross-platform so it does
not look like a good candidate.

On 10/18/2010 10:27 AM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Gary<cedet@...>  wrote:
>>
>> I've been distracted by project work and so on for the last few months,
>> but recently came across
>> http://www.program-transformation.org/PHP/PhpFront (LGPL) "a package you
>> can use to generate, analyse, or transform PHP code". Would it be easier
>> to write some glue between cedet and PFP-front than to write it all from
>> scratch?
>
> Unfortunately it looks like PHP-Front is not cross-platform so it does
> not look like a good candidate.

I didn't see anything on their web site that indicated they were not 
cross patform.  I did see that they used autoconf/libtool though.

 From a generic sense, any tool that can be configured to output a tag 
table from a single source file in a format that an Emacs program can 
convert into a Semantic tags table will work.

In the case of what I read (not much) about the php-tools part it 
appears that there is a tool set, one of which displays functions.  I 
would assume that the easiest course here is to add some "tool" to the 
list already there that will dump out an Emacs Lisp formatted Semantic 
Tag table.  Once there, the CEDET part is pretty easy.

Eric

On 10/19/2010 01:19 PM, Gary wrote:
> Eric M. Ludlam wrote:
>> On 10/18/2010 10:27 AM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
>>> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Gary wrote:
>>>> http://www.program-transformation.org/PHP/PhpFront (LGPL) "a package
>> you
>>>> can use to generate, analyse, or transform PHP code". Would it be
>> easier
>>>> to write some glue between cedet and PFP-front than to write it all
>> from
>>>> scratch?
>>>
>>> Unfortunately it looks like PHP-Front is not cross-platform so it does
>>> not look like a good candidate.
>>
>> I didn't see anything on their web site that indicated they were not
>> cross patform.
>
> I have bookmarks for many similar tools, actually (one is either C or
> something like M4, another in PHP, another in TCL, and so on), which
> must all have some way of recognising PHP syntax. I only really posted
> that particular one because I noticed that they actually have grammars
> (SDF[1]) for PHP versions 4[2]&  5[3], and thought even if the tool was
> not directly useful, those might be. IIRC though, cedet/semantic uses
> some other syntax for describing language grammars?  Anyway, the tools
> are (at least partly) generated from the grammars AFAICT.
>
> Wouldn't it be nice to have some tool to basically convert from one way
> of describing grammars to "some other" way of describing grammaers? Or
> am I either completely off the track (or, possibly, my trolley)?

Indeed.  I tried that with bison->wisent, but found the translation left 
out a lot, and I just ended up getting confused.

>>  From a generic sense, any tool that can be configured to output a tag
>> table from a single source file in a format that an Emacs program can
>> convert into a Semantic tags table will work.
>
> What do you mean by "an Emacs program", please? Some program one would
> have to write, or some specific code that already exists, or what? I
> mean... CTAGS can output a tag table from a single source file, right?

In this case, "Emacs program" means something written in Emacs Lisp that 
will convert the output of some external program into something 
Emacs/CEDET/Semantic can use.  This would be similar to the exuberant 
ctags support that is part of Semantic.

>> In the case of what I read (not much) about the php-tools part it
>> appears that there is a tool set, one of which displays functions.  I
>> would assume that the easiest course here is to add some "tool" to the
>> list already there that will dump out an Emacs Lisp formatted Semantic
>> Tag table.
>
> Okay.
>
>>   Once there, the CEDET part is pretty easy.
>
> Easy for you to say :)

If I made it sound hard, no one would try. :)

Besides, the exuberant ctags example already in Semantic can likely be 
used to prototype in new programs.

Eric