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Saturday, March 9, 2002

Here is a description of a recursive descent parser. comment ()  7:43:43 AM  #   I've been thinking a lot about my column in REALbasic Developer. I've got some interesting ideas for things to talk about. Something I thinking about right now is designing a very simple XML parser in REALbasic as part of the project. I want the document files for the app I'm building (I haven't said what that app is yet) to be stored in XML, as it that will maximize their flexibility. But REALbasic doesn't come with an XML parser built in. But it might be an interesting topic to talk about how to go about writing a very simple XML parser. I've written one like that in C. It isn't a recursive-descent parser. It's driven by a state table. And it's actually kinda cool. The basic engine for a state-table driven parser is very robust. And very easy to extend. You just add more states to the table. But I'm afraid a state-table parser might be too much to talk about in my "From Scratch" column. Recursive-descent parsers are easier to explain. So if I decided to include an XML parser in an article, it'll probably be a recursive-descent parser. comment ()  7:42:15 AM  #   I'm going to release the source to Lua Plugin today. I've got it ready to go. I just need to test it and put it up on my website. For licensing reasons, I can't ship the REALbasic Plugins SDK, which you need to build the plugin. I've also decided not to ship the Lua source, either. Although there are no restrictions on redistributing it. So I'm going to give directions on how to get those two pieces and where to put them so the plugin builds. comment ()  7:36:34 AM  #

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