SynthMakermwvdlee ·
Hi,
I've been running the 30-day trial version of Synthmaker for a while now to try and figure if it's worth the hefty price or not. So far so good and my experimental code is coming along nicely even though I'd really prefer to do some things in procedural code. Right now I'm working on parsing configuration info (filenames, settings, etc) from text files and notice some things I find missing in the parser kit. I've build parsers and parser frameworks in the past and Synthmaker just (IMHO) seems to be lacking some common constructs, such as...
"Set" parser, which matches any single character from a specified string.
"Any" parser (commonly depicted with "." (dot)), which matches any single character.
"Not"/"Except" parser (commonly depicted with "-" (minus)), which matches zero-length string when specified rules do NOT parse. (basically an "anything but this" parser).
"And" parser, which requires two sets of rules to both match. Returning the longest string) Note that a "and(any, not(set("...")))" construct would now be possible too!
The ability to disable whitespace skipping (either globally or locally). (and, linked to this, a specific whitespace parser)
Numbered iteration parser, * matches 0-infinite times, + matches 1-infinite times, a parser (or set thereof) that takes two input integers for the upper- and lower bound of iterations would be useful.
It'd also be nice if the "sequence" and "or" parsers could allow any number of outputs like how the Multiplex module handles this.
p.s. I can't shake the feeling the Parser kit is made using the C++ Spirit framework, or am I mistaken? It's just very uncommon to see "!" used for optional and the only other time I've ever seen it is with that framework.
-- Martijn