Re: [Jflex-devel] Google Summer-of-code 2019

[Gerwin K. <ge...@do...>]

Hi Régis,

work has got me pretty busy again, am a bit slow on email and reviews atm, sorry.

I think gsoc is an excellent idea for JFlex. Main problem would be that I won’t have time to mentor over the European summer next year. Would you be eligible as a gsoc mentor for JFlex?

In terms of projects:

 * I like the AST project. It would still only exist at the front end, though. The back end is an NFA, there are no regular expressions or syntax there any more. The stretch goal could be to have a better programmatic front end for JFlex with it, which could make direct use of the AST.

 * antlr frontend sounds good (could also benefit from the AST, i.e. front ends could all be just AST transformers)

 * own parser generator: probably too big for a summer, there’s a lot of deep technical stuff to solve to write a good parser generator.

 * revamp syntax: would also benefit from AST. We’d have to keep support for the old syntax to not break all lexer specs out there, but it would be nice to have something much cleaner. Come to think of it, I did have a front-end tool for jflex and cup, plus AST generator many years ago (1999ish) with much cleaner syntax, somewhat inspired by ANTLR, but realised differently (sample file attached). It basically generated jflex and cup files and a bunch of classes to represent syntax trees. Could be a starting point for that project.

Cheers,
Gerwin