On 06/14/2007 11:57 AM, Eric Niebler wrote:
Maurizio Vitale wrote:
if you could find a way to completely hide the fact that a terminal is a unary_expr from the user I think it would be much cleaner for a boost::proto release.
I'll give the issue some thought. One possibility is shoehorn into proto the concept of a nullary expression, which is what terminals should rightly be. Of course, what is there already works, so IMO there are bigger fish to fry first.
I think the nullary expression concept is good. I've been trying to see how proto relates to algebra's and their transforms (or homo morphisms), and algebra's have nullary expressions (true and false are nullaries in bool algebra) and the transform from one algebra to another map the nullaries of the source algebra to nullaries of target algebra. Now one particular algebra relevant to proto and spirit and deterministic parsing is what I'll call the "derives_empty" algebra. Expressions in this target algebra are created by a transform from a source algebra which is the algebra of grammar expressions. In that transform (call it gram_to_empty), the transforms are: gram_to_empty(terminal) :-> empty_not gram_to_empty(epsilon) :-> empty_yes gram_to_empty(non_terminal) :-> empty_unknown gram_to_empty(E0 | E1 | ... | En) :-> gram_to_empty(E0) + gram_to_empty(E1) + ... + gram_to_empty(En) gram_to_empty(E0 >> E1 >> ... >> En) :-> gram_to_empty(E0) * gram_to_empty(E1) * ... * gram_to_empty(En) where + and * is a binary operators in the target algebra. Their definition are defined for empty_not and empty_yes in the obvious way. e.g. empty_not | X == X empty_yes | X == empty_yes empty_not * X == empty_not empty_yes * X == X and a grammar's productions can be transformed into a set of equations in the derives_empty algebra whose solution define the empty attribute for each grammar expression. This is, in essence, what the statement: this->attr_fixed_point<attr_empty >(maxit); on line 1348 of: http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/boost/grammar_pipeline/eff/p... does. I've been struggling with doing the same in proto, but haven't been successful yet. Maybe transforming proto to a more "algebraic orientation" would ease the solution. However, without actually doing this transform (which would be a lot of work, I guess), that's just guessing; however, it is something to consider. -regards, Larry