Re: Anybody else with an interest in parser wrangling?

[David Kastrup]

John Wheeler <wheelerwjx9@runbox.com> writes:

> On 3/19/23 11:51, David Kastrup wrote:
>
> When I was becoming familiar with the LilyPond manuals, it seemed to
> me one manual that was missing was a concise specification of the
> LilyPond language, something paralleling the R5RS for the Scheme
> language.  I spend a lot of time studying the lexer.ll/parser.yy code
> trying to put together something along those lines for own use.  Right
> now that work is stuck at a *rough* draft.

The notation reference at one point of time included the bison grammar.
Because so much functionality has been migrated to music functions, and
because the music function parsing works so much with synthetic tokens
not corresponding to user input, this has been discontinued: it is not
really helpful.

For the purpose of parsing LilyPond files, it would be an idea to
convert music functions based on their signatures into ad-hoc syntax
rules and generate a syntax based on that that can be used for
parsing/coloring/editing/whatever LilyPond input files.

> Given that effort, I think I have a fair idea of how the lexer/parser
> functions.  I would be happy to contribute in this area.
>
> How can I be of service?

I think the document to spell this out in would be the contributor's
guide.  It is a document of rather mixed quality and mixed coverage.
But it's probably the best place to point people to anyway.

-- 
David Kastrup