On 10/5/06, F. Senault <fred / lacave.net> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Where I work, we have to develop and maintain a quite huge application
> fully written in Visual Basic 6 [1].
>
> Quite a few tasks should be automated, and being the magical-one-liner-
> script guru of the workplace, I'm the one tasked with a bunch of things.
>
> So, I could continue to throw together bunches of ugly ruby and perl
> scripts written each to achieve one specific goal, or I could try to
> think a bit further and try to implement something more elegant,
> powerful, and adaptable.
>
> But, to do that, I need to parse advanced VB6 code, to a quite fine
> grained point.  For instance, detecting dead code and dead variables.
>
> I took a look at some projects out there, including full-fledged parsers
> (none in ruby, or none fully useable, AFAI), but I didn't manage to do
> much.
>
> Are there any solutions out there that I overlooked ?  Someone around
> who has some experience in the domain to give pointers (though I'd
> gladly accept code too... :) ) ?

Just a few hints:

- Joel Spolsky said they have a compiler from VB to PHP, although I'm
a bit sceptic about whether he will release that (see
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html)

- Zed Shaw has used ragel to build an http parser in mongrel, so if
you end up writing a parser, you might have a look at his one (look
for 'Mongrel grammar file' thread,
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/mongrel-users/2006-August/001241.html)

J.