ANN: Introducing PLY-1.0 (Python Lex-Yacc)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

David Beazley wrote:
> 
> June 18, 2001
> 
>                  Announcing :  PLY-1.0 (Python Lex-Yacc)
> 
>                   http://systems.cs.uchicago.edu/ply
> 
> Just when you thought it was safe, I'm pleased to announce the availability
> of an entirely new Python parser construction tool.
> 
> PLY is a 100% Python implementation of the common parsing tools lex
> and yacc.  Although several other parsing tools are available for
> Python, there are several reasons why you might want to consider PLY:
> ...
>  -  Like John Aycock's excellent SPARK toolkit, PLY uses Python
>     reflection to build lexers and parsers.  This greatly simplifies
>     the task of parser construction since it reduces the number of files
>     and eliminates the need to run a separate lex/yacc tool before
>     running your program.

Just a suggestion: PLY seems to use the same logic for attaching
grammar snippets to functions as SPARK does. IMHO, this is bad
design since doc-strings should really only be used for documentation
and not include vital information for the program logic.

Note that in Python 2.1 we have function attributes which were
added for exactly this reason, so the doc-string approach is
not really needed anymore. I'd suggest to move to these for one 
of the next releases.

> ...
> More information about PLY can be obtained on the PLY webpage at:
> 
>                   http://systems.cs.uchicago.edu/ply
> 

Great package !

Just trying to get rid off doc-string overloading,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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