There is a possibility to post code snippets in many programming languages in Slack:
We have a domain-specific language in our platform and it would be great to have a code snippet type in Slack with the custom code coloring scheme. Is there any possibility to achieve this?
No, it is not possible to define a custom syntax highlighting scheme. You might be better off experimenting with the ones already defined to see whether they provide any accidental pleasant highlighting of your custom DSL.
Related
Considering me a newbie into this but if I want to develop an engine to extract only validations from a technical documents like functional specification. Usually the validations are quick to identify.
If this can be done somehow I can use it for further automation.
I checked and few frameworks are available like
https://opennlp.apache.org/
http://nlp.stanford.edu/
I did few POC's as well , but designing an intelligent engine having generic rules is where I am getting blocked.
Any pointers will be helpful ...
For extracting only validation you need to have the grammar or similar like structure maybe a regular expression. If you dont have ANY idea what type of validation you might face then you can follow un-supervised learning approach. Designing any generic rule is not as easy as it sound so you need to work extra hard for this.
I'm a developer for a database platform that uses a specific programming language very similar to vbscript to carry out some of the functionality of the user interface. The current developing editor used is notepad++ which already has a custom language highlighter. The need for a code tidier has emerged and I have already been looking into customizing an already existing formatter/beautifier but have failed to find any proper documentation as how to carry it out properly. As far as i understand, i will probably need to write an interpreter and use nppexec plugin, I have written a lexer in bison before so i guess i am not a total beginner.
Can anyone perhaps point out a guide or give a few pointers to make things a bit easier to carry out?
I'm just asking this out of curiosity :
Is there any tool that can automatically convert a source code of reasonable complexity from one language to another ?
Is there any "meta-language" that can compile into several other languages ? For example CoffeeScript compiles into Javascript.
If you know any open-source example, it'd be great !
Thank you for your time.
PS: No idea how to tag this. Feel free to edit.
GCC converts complex C++ code into machine code and thus technically is an answer to your question. In fact, there are lots of compiler like this, but I don't think these are what you intended to ask.
There are tools that are hardwired to translate just one language to another as source code (another poster suggested "f2C", which is a perfect example). These are just like compilers... but rarer.
There are virtually no tools that will map from one language to many others, out of the box. The problem is that languages have different execution models, data types, and execution schemes, which such a translator has to simulate properly in the target language.
The are "code generators" that claim to do this, but they are largely IMHO specifications of rather simple functions that translate trivially to simple code in the target langauge.
If you want to translate one language to another in a sort of general way, you need a program transformation system, e.g., a system that can parse arbitrary langauges, and for which you can provide translation rules that map to other languages in a sort of straightforward way.
Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is one of these. This SO What kinds of patterns could I enforce on the code to make it easier to translate to another programming language? discusses the issues in more detail.
You can convert Fortran code to C using the f2c tool.
For python, you can convert a subset of the language to C++ using shedskin.
The vala language is converted to C before the real compilation.
Duplicate of:
Learning to write a compiler
Documentation on creating a programming language
Learning Resources on Parsers, Interpreters, and Compilers
Suggestions for writing a programming language?
Compiler-Programming: What are the most fundamental ingredients?
Are there some online resources about compiler principle?
and others I'm too lazy to find right now.
I'm not asking how to make an incredibly complex language. I just wanted to understand the basics. I would use c# as the underlying language. I know it's vague. I was hoping for something very basic to direct me.
I think I'm mostly interested in creating scripting languages. For example, I see people that write programs but then they have a scripting language for their application. I do not want to rewrite a windows scripting language. Say I had a text file reader and for some reason wanted a scripting language to automate something. I'm not sure how to ask.
Thank you.
EDIT - Thank you for the answers. I was looking at it more for the learning not the doing at the moment. I would probably use LUA, but I am trying to learn more about the concept in general.
You could take a look at LUA - I've used it to great success each time I asked myself the question "How would I automate insert task here in insert one of my apps here?"
Edit: Here are some examples (taken from the links page, admittedly, unwieldy Lua Wiki) on how you could embed Lua in your app:
Embedding Lua in C: Using Lua from inside C
Embedding a scripting language inside your C/C++ code
Embeddable scripting with Lua
You can use an existing language like Python or Javascript. For example, for Javascript, there is http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ for Java apps. So typically you don't need to actually invent a new language, you would just provide a custom API for a language that already exists.
first you need a lexical parser like lex, then a syntax parser like bison.
then you can work with the syntax parser to create an interpreter to 'execute' the syntax results.
that's how the most scripting languages do.
p.s: another way is to practice by writing shells - shell scripts (bash, csh, or sh) are highly simplified scripting languages.
Some terminology is in order. You may be talking about a domain-specific language.
The two basic ways to transform a text file into an "executable": a compiler or an interpreter. An interpreter fits the scripting concept better, as it is easier to build and executes lines one at a time. Note that beyond a very simple language both writing a decent parser or a decent interpreter are non-trivial. The classic work on interpreters is SICP, but this is quite a hard book for beginners.
Scott Hanselman mentioned in his latest hanselminutes podcast that integrating IronPython to allow scripting of an existing application was very easy to do.
If you're interested in the end target of having your application be scriptable, then you should definitely consider using an existing language rather than attempting to write your own.
If you are more interested in the educational experience of writing your own scripting language, then you should go for it!
There's no need to create a new scripting language there are several eg. Rhino which is a widely used embeddable javascript (http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/) or Jscript from MS, that you can use directly in your product.
I've gone the way that you are asking - I once created my own scheme interpreter. This worked really well, but we re-invented a lot of technology and didn't really get a lot of additional benefit. We would have been far better off just using one of the scheme's that were available. I would not make that decision again even though it was fun and successful.
Does anyone have any experience with the JetBrains Meta Programming System? Is MPS better than, say, developing a DSL in Ruby?
I don't have any personal experience with MPS, but it was mentioned on the recent episode of Herding Code with Markus Völter. Here's my understanding. MPS is a projection editor which means, instead of parsing and editing text, you are directly editing the underlining language data structure. As Markus mentions, MPS allows you to define your own language but you can also introduce new language concepts into existing languages. For example, you can add a new keyword to Java in a matter of minutes. MPS blurs the lines between internal and external DSLs and, with this, you get static typing and tool support which you wouldn't get when developing a DSL with a dynamic language like Ruby.
I work for JetBrains. I led the MPS project for several years, and now I am working on another project which is also completely written in MPS. According to my experience, MPS is worth using :-)
The answer to your question depends on many things. If you have Ruby based system, or want to create a language quickly, Ruby based internal DSL might be the best choice. If you want to generate Java, and have time to learn MPS, MPS might be the best case. You might also consider systems like XText, etc, which are middle ground between Ruby based DSLs and MPS.
MPS is an interesting beast and has a very huge potential. The idea is simply fantastic:
Inside an IDE (MPS) the user defines more or less visually his DSL(s)
the IDE allows to generate not just the language itself (the runtime or what it does), but also the "tool" aka a more or less full blown IDE, that he or other users can use to edit that new language.
That being said, unfortunately at least for the actual available MPS versions, Jetbrains failed to deliver the above(at least for me) because:
- it is very very hard and complicated to use - like it would not have been made by the authors of the easy to use IntelliJ.
- there are just too many concepts and "ways" the user needs to learn before it's able to do something useful, and still one gets the feeling of tapping into the dark.
- the IDE won't generate an IDE for you but something inside MPS too, a "Cell Based Editor" only (as of this version).
I tried MPS several times (cause the concept is so wonderful and promising), but unfortunately as of this moment I wasn't able to do something useful with it.
I might be to stupid for MPS, but in the time I was just figuring out basic about MPS, I was able to deliver fully blown usable Groovy based DSL.
I'm still following MPS's evolution, and hope that one day will deliver what did initially promised, since it's such a fantastic idea.
Macros in common lisp object system CLOS can alter the syntax quite dramatically, MPS is pretty similar to ANTLR, but it comes with a graphical editor. However MPS does not appreciate code fragmenting beyond compile and runtime and hence both MPS and ANTLR convolve around static metaprogramming problems. You still can't create constructs that will accept an arbitrary number of sub-construct arguments like Monadics, eg; a list comprehension builder that takes an arbitrary number of filters and list generators. To make that possible you need to programmatically alter the raw AST. More experienced Lispers can probably point out other transformations that can't be done.
I agree that documentation has been an issue for beginners when learning MPS. This was certainly true when the previous post was written (2010). Having experienced this first-hand, and finally having succeeded in understanding the system, I wrote The MPS Language Workbench (volumes I and II) to help smooth the learning curve. Feedback I get from readers is that the books are sufficient to help you get started (Volume I) and learn more advanced aspects of the MPS platform (Volume II).
Regarding the answer to the original question. Yes, I believe MPS has key advantages compared to developing a DSL in Ruby or Groovy. The reason is that as a language designer you
Have much better control over all aspects of the language,
The languages you build with MPS can include graphical notations and user interface elements, which make them a hybrid between a user interface and a text DSL script/program,
MPS helps migrate programs as you evolve your language (e.g., refactoring or other changes to the language can propagate to the end-users of the languages, using automatic DSL script/program migrations).
You can see a good example of DSL built with MPS in the MetaR project.