Re: [tcljava-dev] Parsing Jacl

[Tom P. <tpo...@ny...>]

On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 03:26:15PM -0800, Mo DeJong wrote:
> Funny you should mention this now, I just started on a project to do something
> very much the same except that I am going to parse Jacl and write out .java
> source code.


Funny you should mention this, * 2.  I too started on a similar project, 
but it's been on the shelf for quite a while.  My idea was to write the
entire system in Tcl, using 'parsetcl' (http://wiki.tcl.tk/9649), as the
main parser, and a modified version of Nsync's (should ring a few bells, eh!)
LL(1) parser to parse 'expr' expressions.  Then compile the whole thing 
on the fly using my Hyde package.  I had thoughts on generating either Java
or C, depending on the actual runtime (using critcl to do the on-the-fly
compilation for C).  I had also modified Jacl to expose CallFrame and 
Namespace classes as public.  Yeah, I realize that writing the compiler system
in Tcl would be slow, but I was planning to write the compiler in a way to 
allow bootstrapping the compiler itself.

I was also planning to impose some limitations on the compiler to avoid
the sticky parts of compiling Tcl, such as assuming all builtin commands 
as immmutable, punting on 'trace', etc.  I never got that far to worry 
about the actual implementation.

Good luck, and keep us informed on your progress.  

-- 
Tom Poindexter
tpo...@ny...
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/