Re: Announcing Ox release 1.10.1

Howdy, Roger, responses to your questions below:
> On Feb 7, 2022, at 1:21 PM, Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
>
> Hello Tom,
>
> I have a few questions about Ox:
>
> 1. Is there a complete, up-to-date, easy-to-read Ox manual?


Kurt Bischoff, the original (primary?) Ox developer at Iowa State University,
wrote a tutorial (dtd 5 Nov 1993) and a reference manual (dtd 14 Nov 1993).


I have attempted to keep both documents current as I’ve expanded on the
original Ox functionality - the reference manual more extensively than the
tutorial. Both documents are in the ‘./docs’ distribution directory, in
both PDF and in LaTeX source form.


I believe that both documents are current, although it is certainly possible
that I’ve missed something. To date, this is a one-man labor of love ;-)


As to whether the documents are “easy-to-read”, you will have to be the
judge of that.


I suspect that the reference manual might be considered a bit cryptic if one
isn’t already familiar with attribute grammars. Furthermore, the
limitations of the current Ox translator (in particular, allowing arbitrary
C/C++ code in an attribute's definition), make it easy to create hidden
attribute dependencies that will randomly break the Ox-generated code.


I’m open to constructive comments from users, but so far no one has said
anything to me directly.




> 2. Are there any published books on Ox?


No … do you want to write one?


The original Ox distribution includes an example compiler for a small
programming language, GPPL, built using Ox (and originally Yacc and Lex). The
compiler generates C source code. I have maintained the GPPL compiler, but
only to the extent required to enable it to compile, link & execute.


Kurt Bischoff wrote a report describing the compiler: "GPPL: A Small
Block-Structured Imperative Programming Language Implemented using Ox”, Iowa
State University TR#92-32, December, 1992. A Postscript file of that document
from Kurt’s last known Ox distribution is in the ‘./gppl’ distribution
directory.




> 3. Is there an Ox group on Stack Overflow?


Not that I am aware of.


I did a search just now on the Stack Overflow web and only found 2 questions
that were obviously about Ox, both from the same user in April & May of 2021.
I guess I should investigate how to set up a trigger to get notified of future
Ox questions.




> 4. Are there any commercial products that were developed using Ox?


Not to my knowledge. I don’t get much user feedback, save for the
infrequent bug report.


According to the SourceForge server, there have been a total of 472 downloads
of the various Ox distribution files since December 2018, which was when I
first registered the project. That tells me is there is a non-trivial level
of interest, so I’ve kept at it.


Regards,


Tom Shields

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