Re: Elegant code Was: Re: what kind of non microconroller app are

On Apr 23, 11:20 am, Gerry <ge...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On 23 Apr, 09:00, Alex McDonald <b...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Apr 22, 6:00 pm, Ian Osgood <i...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > > I personally think post-modern programming is the way of the future.
A
> > > language which cannot sup****t it is doomed to the sidelines. Thus, I
> > > think Forth should start borrowing from other languages, continuing
to
> > > standardize but focusing more on standard code libraries, im****t
> > > mechanisms, foreign-function interfaces and otherwise working well
> > > with others.
>
> > > Ian
>
> > Prosaic mode:
>
> > Then there is hope for "fat Forths" like Win32Forth. If there's one
> > thing W32F encourages, it's getting leverage from existing libraries
> > of code (DLLs primarily).
>
> That's something I want to introduce into my system, a project for
> the future as I haven't a clue how to do it at present.
>
> > The only downside at the moment is the
> > automation of the interface, where MPE's VxForth has the neat ability
> > to im****t C function headers directly. I've worked a little with SWIG
> > (http://www.swig.org/)
and used XSLT on the XML output it generates,
> > but it's far from automatic.
>
> Presumably this is essentially text translation, XML to Forth and this
> is probably a silly question. Is there scope for using LexGen and
> Gray to do this as for the BNF to Gray tool discussed earlier in this
> thread or would that not offer any advantage over XSLT.

Yes, the XSLT is just transformation of the SWIG XML output. However,
there's still a lot of hand editing to do; not all C function headers
are amenable to this level of automation in XSLT without a lot of
work. Plus, XSLT is quite hard to use and write; it qualifies as a
write-only language IMHO. Revisiting it today made me realise how ugly
it is for humans to parse. There must be better transformation
languages out there, but when the input is XML...

>
> Gerry

--
Regards
Alex McDonald