Re: Lexer and syntax highlighter powered by LPeg

[Peter Odding <xolox@...>]

Andy Stark wrote:
> Would it be feasible/desirable for a future version of Lua to use PEG
> techniques (coded in C) in its own parser?
What advantage would that bring? The Lua parser works already, right? Unless,

> If LPEG was distributed as a standard library, then would it be possible
> for Lua's parser to be written in Lua, perhaps with a few extra library
> functions)?
There would certainly be some bootstrapping problems since LPeg uses Lua 
operators to compose patterns :). I know of a language which bootstraps itself 
with some minimal operators but I can't seem to find it right now. I think it 
was hosted on sf.net. A different approach would be to write the Lua parser in 
LPeg via the Lua C API, then you could hook in your own patterns (written in 
Lua) without problems. But these patterns would extend the syntax, not change 
it. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to, for example, parse [[ long string ]] 
because those need a callback function, which needs to be written in Lua...

Though I must admit I've always been fascinated by bootstrapping systems like 
compilers and parsers :)