Thursday, February 26, 2009

Another jSuneido Milestone

jSuneido now parses Suneido code, at least the 11 mb of source code that I threw at it.

Note: I'm only checking that it parse successfully - I'm not checking the results of the parse so there could still be problems. For example, in ambiguous cases it might be picking the wrong choice. But I don't think it's too likely because the wrong choices almost always lead to later syntax errors.

It didn't take long to set up the framework to read cSuneido dump files since I already had done this for loading stdlib into the database.

I initially expected a lot of failures but I was still a little surprised when it failed to parse a single record from stdlib! But I was still fresh and the sun was shining (although it was -30!) so I could laugh.

I soon found it was because all the stdlib records start with a copyright comment. Of course, none of my tests had an initial comment. This was easy to fix.

After that it was just slogging, fixing errors one by one. Sometimes programming seems like mountain climbing. Finishing a project and getting to the top are great, but you'd better enjoy the process as well, since that's where you spend most of your time.

I was really hoping to get the parsing working by the end of the day, but by late afternoon it seemed like I might not make it. Then I fixed one more bug and ... no more errors! It threw me off for a minute. I'd grown so accustomed to the error output that it took me a minute to realize it had succeeded.

I wish I could say I was done with parsing, but I still have to go back and rewrite the query parsing to not use Antlr. Oh well, that shouldn't take too long.

Then on to actually generating Java byte code! I'm going to try using ASM to start. It looks promising and even has an Eclipse plugin, but if it doesn't work out, there are other alternatives.

2 comments:

Penny McKinlay said...

Congratulations! You're getting there - one step at a time.

Jen said...

Congrats!