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Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:27:25 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Moving to an AST-based parsing/compilation process
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")


On 05/09/12 18:59, Andrew Faulds wrote:
> On 05/09/12 13:48, Morgan L. Owens wrote:
>> I'm not a core dev, but I would like to add to the notes above that 
>> "third parties", such as myself, who want to do things with PHP 
>> source other than run it through a PHP interpreter would also 
>> appreciate such a separation of concerns.
>>
>> To date, I've been basing work, which exposes syntactic structure, on 
>> phc's maketea grammar (Phalanger's is more up to date, but also more 
>> complicated what with its provenance and the Linq and generics and 
>> all), but it's reverse-engineered and certainly wrong (oh, that 
>> reminds me...); the existing grammar is unsuitable because no-one 
>> wants to see _that_.
>>
>> Something authoritative that _by definition_ tracks the current 
>> version would be more reassuring as regards accuracy and 
>> compatibility (and be more likely to result in something that 
>> deserves to be let out into the world with confidence).
>>
>>
> To add to your point:
>
> If we make it produce an AST, I wonder if we could possibly expose 
> this through PHP, perhaps with some sort of extension. Then parsers 
> and such for PHP could simply ask PHP to do the parsing for them, and 
> then do analysis - no more duplicating official PHP grammar.
>
> I'm just speculating here, but this would be pretty cool if we could 
> do it.
+1. It will be very useful for static analysis, test, control flow graph 
etc.

-- 
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa.42/ or http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/