Re: LPEG primer

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

Humberto Aranha wrote:

> See: http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html#intro
> It contains references and examples.
>
> -Humberto Aranha 



Japa wrote:
> I recommend you to look http://lua-users.org/wiki/LpegRecipes
> In this page you will see more examples with LPeg.
>
> good luck
[snip]
> --
> Marcelo Oikawa



Thanks you both for the pointers, but as I said in my previous message, 
I _did_ search the Wiki, but I found the examples in the LPeg recipes 
page a bit obscure. And I, of course, did read the documentation coming 
with LPeg.
As I said, I'm no CS wizard and although I did some examples a try, I 
didn't get the big picture and still feel uneasy. I fear that all those 
examples are targeted at people knowing much more than I do about 
grammars and the like (or maybe it's just me that didn't try harder :-) ).

As I hinted before, I always viewed grammars as a way to understand the 
meaning of a language construct. I never designed a grammar. So, as far 
as I understood it, LPeg is about casting a text matching problem into a 
syntactical structure parsing problem (sorry if terminology is lacking 
rigour), that is, to design a grammar as the text to match were part of 
a language.

Since I heard so many people praising Lpeg, I hoped it would be good for 
me too, but I begin to feel I need some experience in grammar design.
I really had hoped to get along without delving into a CS textbook.


(I also read the page on Wikipedia about PEGs, but didn't help much, 
since it always focused on CS issues: parsers, grammars, etc.).

Maybe I'm missing something and effectively LPeg can be used effectively 
only by people with strong CS background ?
If this is the case, I think that will rule out Lpeg for me ( :-( )
Sorry for the noise anyway.

Best Regards,

-- Lorenzo