Pedro de Medeiros schrieb:
On 4/24/06, Ivan Krstic krstic@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
As a matter of fact, I did. Sometime ago. But code was difficult to understand, it wouldn't compile and running bison on the .y file returned lots (maybe 2000?) grammar conflicts.
The latter part of this is surprising. Timwi, can you clarify? I seem to remember that the parser was incomplete, but what of it was there worked fine.
If I am not mistaken, the name of the directory is flexbisonparse. CVS tells me it is several months stopped. Code was probably confusing because wiki syntax is not really context free, so there is a lot of considerations to make beforehand.
I would also like to know from Timwi (or anyone who is involved with it) what is planned for this parser in the future and how it will be used.
That depends also in what platform this parser need be, and also for what use.
Not really. My point was that it's easy to build a parser for *a lot* of the MediaWiki syntax, and hard to build one for all of it. We need the latter.
Ok. But what I said about writing the wiki parser is not besides the point: I suppose a complete wiki parser is pretty much needed. If one is to finish an incomplete parser or to rewrite a new one based on that is a matter of approach. And I think the existing one needs some heavy lifting and, from what I saw of it, it won't be an easy task to complete it.
Timwi's work used standard tools that would eventually produce a C parser, IIRC. Of course none of the parsers in SVN are complete -- if they were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Yes, I guess it is pretty much unmantained nowadays. Most of it is more than 2 years old. I guess this serves as an indication that it needs a heavy lifting. :)
After Timwi stopped working on it, I had a look but couldn't make enough sense of the lexer to contribute anything useful.
The parser was actually quite developed at the time, with the notable exception of HTML-style tags; anything between two matching ones was not parsed at all. If someone could add that, it would be 90% complete (rough estimate).
Magnus