On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Robert Klemme wrote:

>
> Hugh,
>
> the one thing I didn't see in your posting is a statement about the language. 
> What capabilities should it have?  If it's just assigning constants to vars

I was trying to keep this general because I run into the problem of
parsing non-simplistic grammars so often.  It's easy to do the
  <verb> <direct object> 
type grammars with lots of verbs[1], but...

My present example is that I want to parse Constructive Solid
Geometry descriptions, at the moment limited to cones, spheres,
bricks with the co-ordinates specified, and I need to specify
material types as well.

I'd also like to be able to declare new objects so they can be
placed.  Silly example:  Get two small spheres to cap the ends of
a cylinder and call the result a Sausage.  Then place several
Sausages in the space at different points.

Later I'd have to extend the language to be able to rotate them into
psoition.  Lots of creeping featurism is likely, I suspect.  I
didn't have material types to deal with before.

> (like often needed for configurations) then Regexp is probably fine.  From

Agreed

> what you write I'm guessing that your envisioned language is more complex - 
> but how complex?  Maybe it's a special case for which someone somewhere has a 
> solution already.
>
> Regards
>
>   robert

         Thank you
         Hugh

[1] some years back I got Arthur Secret's Agora (Perl, web by email)
program working and extended it considerably. I used regexps for
that.