2007/11/24, Marc Piulachs marc.piulachs@codexchange.net:
That's the problem I'm trying to solve..:) The point on this change is not really store them in xml inset of plain text, is not that important, for me there are two reasons, first declare this information so rbuild can manipulate it as objects and apply checking , logic , whatever ... and the most important store the information on a neutral , compiler agnostic and rich format that allow us to generate (export to) ANY format we desire out of it. Currently def files are tided to mingw which is bad.
The "plain text" files (aka *.def, *.spec) can be described with (E)BNF notion. And the (E)BNF could be of coursed used to feed a lexer/parser generator, etc. (in theory) ;-)
I think it's not the best idea to re-invent the wheel by constructing another new high level language with xml alike syntax.
as Aleksey mentioned:
Theoretically extending this logic to infinity will lead to creation of a new high level language, stored in xml documents, parsing which rbuild generates source code in C or other language needed. :-).
btw. it would be very useful to have a documentation of the current (trunk) rbuild syntax, for example in EBNF (Extended Backus–Naur form) notion.
With the EBNF syntax on a single sheet, you could construct a rbuild file from scratch without forking an existing rbuild file or reading the rbuild source code.
Klemens