Re: Applying compiler technologies to the document processing industry

Laurent Sabarthez <vlaures@igcom.fr> wrote:


>Hi everybody,
>
>I'm working in an I18N/L10N company. We make lots of conversion
>utilities, from one document format to another (Interleaf, SGML, HTML,
>RTF, and so on). Our tools are getting every day closer to full-scale
>parsers and scanners, much like the ones used in the "ordinary"
>compiler industry.
>
>There are differences, however. For example, the borderline between
>lexical and syntactic issues is not always that clear. We don't have
>code generators, of course, but rather "text/markup" generators.
>
>My question is: given that so many people seem to be involved in quite
>similar activities (developing document-processing tools very close to
>compiling tools), is there anybody here on comp.compilers interested
>in such topics?


          I am. I have described myself previously as a comp.compilers
wannabe. I have never written a "real" compiler and may never. What
I have done is write programs to generate code.


          I use such a tool for generating a lot of the table code for
Visual FoxPro forms. Basically, it generates a LOT of assignment
statements. The only sophistication it has is in delimiters. The
source code (such as it is) is much more manageable than all those
assignment statements.


          I have also written programs to generate batch files and have
parsed files using simple finite state automata.


          None of these applications are particularly fancy, but they have
saved me a lot of clerical work.


[snip]


Sincerely,


Gene Wirchenko
--

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