[ragel-users] Some clarifications needed

[Adrian Thurston]

Usually an incremental approach to parser writing is the best.

* Machine definition creates a named regular expression that can be 
referenced in other expressions.

* Machine instantiation creates a state machine from an expression.

The |* *| syntax is a scanner. You can find it in the manual.

-Adrian

On 13-09-14 09:44 AM, Etienne Samson wrote:
> Hello ragel-users !
>
> I'm trying to build a C parser for IMAP (RFC3501), but since I'm a complete beginner at ragel *and* I want to do it the best way I can think of, I'm having a hard time ;-). Please tell me what you think of the approach I'm aiming for, if I'm a little heavy-handed or whatever…
>
> So, I'm trying to split parts of the ABNF for IMAP in different ragel machines for easy reuse. I already have :
> - abnf.rl that contains machine definitions for basic ABNF tokens (ALPHA, BIT, …),
> - rfc3501.rl which contains basic "common" things between what will become my different machines (tag, address, …),
> - rfc3501_response.rl which contains stuff relating to server replies, (response, response_tagged, …)
> - imap_parser.rl that is supposed to be in charge of parsing a server's response into my own "message" C structure. This is the only one I'm "write"ing directly.
>
> My previous attempt was to copy/paste the whole ABNF from the RFC, convert it to ragel syntax and pray that it works. Luckily, it didn't, and since I ended up as the happy owner of a ragel state machine that has 3070 transitions and that I couldn't understand why it fails and where, I'm scaling back, and switching to divide-and-conquer (the only thing gained is that I can now look up a rule in my old file and integrate it pretty quickly after more thorough testing).
>
> So, here's a list of the questions I have :
>
> - I feel a little lost at the difference between a machine definition and a machine instantiation. It seems it works like C functions, definition = prototype and instantiation = actual function ? But even though they're different, you can attach actions to both of them. I understand that you can use definition to have a single place to tell ragel what actual syntax to parse (example from rfc3501_response, 'response_untagged = "tag SP resp_cond_state CRLF";'). But I can't use instantiations from one of my including files.
>
> - What does "main := |* stuff *|" mean ? I haven't been able to grasp what ragel does with it, I've seen no explanation in the user guide, and quite a few examples I found use that. In fact, I was thinking it was part of the instantiation syntax until I found examples that weren't using that (like mailbox.rl).
>
> Cordialement,
> Etienne Samson
> --
> samson.etienne at gmail.com
>
>
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> ragel-users at complang.org
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