Re: Need starting tips for a new interpreter / parser

> [I certainly hope nobody's writing yet another visual report generator,
> since most of them look to me worse than the primitive one I wrote for
> my thesis in about 1978. But this looks like a fine candidate for Python
> which is at www.python.org or maybe TCL at www.neosoft.com/tcl or
> www.scriptics.com. If nothing else, hacking something up in Python or TCL
> is fast and then you can try some experiments to decide if you're done
> or not. Even if you end up with your own language, the application
> specific stuff will be reusable. -John]
>


COMMENTS:
That is my goal too; NOT to create another visual tool,
and also my main reason in planning to create
a reporting language, completely source-code driven.


You see, John, I am sick of all these Visual tools, because you always
end up in having hundreds of calculated/formula fields all over your
reports, to solve-real world report needs. And when trying to include
new stuff to your report after ex. one year, you have forgot where you
have the calculation you need to change, and in locating it, you need
to double-click every formula field to find it (and ofcourse it is the
last one).


It seems to me that the developers of these tools, in order to sell
their product, need to visualize everything, and that may be right,
beacuse the market only wants nice looking GUI screens. But my
reporting experience is more than making a list of customers!!!


(My tool will certainly not just LOOK nice, but it will WORK nice, and
be very powerful, compared to Visual focused tools)


I hope to get some support on this project in comp.compilers, because
I feel a little alone with these ideas.


(I will investigate the tools you mentioned, Python and TCL!)


-Harald
[Making GUI applications programmable is always a challenge. But there's
a lot of prior art in non-GUI reporters too, going back to the late
lamented COBOL report writer which was actually rather nice even though
it had an undeserved reputation as complex and baffling. -John]

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