[REBOL] Re: Parse rules as data
From: joel:neely:fedex at: 27-Jun-2001 10:24
Hi, Brett,
Brett Handley wrote:
> The idea you think I had appears not to be the one I think
> I had. But you're most welcome to pursue the former, though
> my interest is actually in the latter.
>
You're welcome to credit for both! ;-) I was just observing
another application of the root notion of "reverse interpreting"
the parse dialect.
> Then I'd like to provide a new model and have content
> "calculated" for me doing something like:
>
> rebsite: transform author-index rebsites-spec hints-spec
>
> where rebsites-spec is
>
> rebsite-spec: context [
> reblink: ['folder linkurl 'info author]
> author: [string!]
> linkurl: [url!]
> model*: [ any reblink ]
> ]
>
> and hint-spec contains the magical transformation dialect
> that makes it all possible :)
>
...
> So I guess I'm wondering if some function 'transform and some
> fantastic transformation dialect will be more economical than
> just writing the transformation directly in straight Rebol code.
>
I'd guess it depends on how often one does transformations that
are sufficiently similar. There are probably situations where the
(possibly high) investment in effort to implement the transformer
would have a payback over repeatedly hand-crafting the individual
translations, but I'd need LOTS of experience doing the specific
cases before I'd feel comfortable doing the general case.
> Should I go back to dreaming?
>
Dreams are good! For some dream-inspiration, take a look at
the specs for XSL and XSLT at
http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/
They're addressing the corresponsing problem for XML -- given one
structure expressed in XML, how can one write rules that specifiy
how to map it to a different structure in XML/HTML/XHTML?
It might give you some more ideas.
--
It's turtles all the way down!
joel'dot'neely'at'fedex'dot'com
