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Meta-language for mxTextTools

Christian Tismer tismer at appliedbiometrics.com
Thu Jul 15 10:31:49 EDT 1999 
"Tony J. Ibbs (Tibs)" wrote:
> 
> I am aiming to use Marc-André Lemburg's mxTextTools package for an
> application in my (hah!) spare time. Being me, the first thing I've set out
> to do is to provide the missing meta-language so that I can avoid typing in
> the tag tables as "bare" tuples.
> 
> What I've done so far is to produce an alpha version of the meta-language
> documentation, which can be found at
> 
>     http://www.tibsnjoan.demon.co.uk/mxtext/metalang.html
> 
> Translations of the examples from the mxTextTools distribution are also
> supplied.

I had a look. And after reading from your page

"""
The general notation: 

     <condition>:
         <suite>
     <statement>

(where <suite> is one or more statements) is exactly equivalent to: 

     <condition> F:<labelN> [T:next]
         <suite>
     <labelN>
     <statement>
"""
...

I got the impression: Why another language?
Can't we express the tagging tuples by Python programs?
Marc's tuples are nothing more than predefined actions,
conditions, and jumps to labels.

Given a restricted subset of Python, and a couple of known
functions which are to be used, the tags could be expressed
as a small number of Python functions, and
it would be a real application for the ByteCodeHacks
to turn these Python functions back into tagging tables.
We would go without any parsing since Python does it for us.

Whoops - I could make the tagging engine into a pluggable
interpreter for stackless Python, this is just another engine.

yes-I-have-to-duck-and-cover-ly y'rs - chris :-)

-- 
Christian Tismer             :^)   <mailto:tismer at appliedbiometrics.com>
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