(Resending from the correct email address.) ------Original Message------ From: Eric Niebler To: biolaser To: boost-users@lists.boost.org ReplyTo: eric.niebler@gmail.com Subject: Re: xpressive app question Sent: Jul 4, 2009 12:03 PM (Apologies for the top-post. Darn Blackberry.) Hi William, In the future, please send end user questions about Boost libraries to boost-users@lists.boost.org. Xpressive grammars with semantic actions have all the power to build any kind of parser you need, context-free or otherwise. I think it will work well for you. Another option to consider is Boost.Spirit, which is designed with the lex/yacc scenarios in mind. It is a very powerful parser generator, but without xpressive's dynamic grammar facilities. If you go that route, I'd recommend Spirit2, which is still under development but very usable, clean and powerful. Good luck, -- Eric Niebler BoostPro Computing www.boostpro.com From: "biolaser" Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 20:22:26 -0600 To: 'Eric Niebler' Subject: xpressive app question Hi Eric,   I’ve been looking through the xpressive documentation and I’m very, very impressed. You’ve approached the creation of this system with astounding energy, a very wide pragmatic view of things, and great intelligence and foresight. I really hope xpressive will be suited for my needs.   I’m desirous of creating a language (collection of grammars or tokens) that will be incorporated into a runtime for a report-writer engine I’m developing. The user will task the engine via this custom language. In the past I used lex and yacc extensively for similar projects. As you know, yacc facilitates the creation/recognition of a custom language (by defining patterns which contain various grammars (tokens)) and lex facilitates the creation/recognition of the individual grammars (tokens) themselves.   Will xpressive facilitate the creation/recognition of a custom language by letting me define patterns of grammars? Or will I need to code that logic myself, as respects recognizing a collection of grammars to form certain complete language patterns?   I hope I have posed my question clearly enough. If xpressive is not well suited to the higher level pattern-recognition tasks, is there something else that is yacc-like that will serve that purpose and that will work well with xpressive?   Thanks for your help,   William Stroupe