21.3.06

Languagemachine

I had a phone call from Peri Hankey, urging me to look at his programming language, called languagemachine. It looks rather idiosyncratic to me, and doesn't seem to have much bearing on Links.

2 comments:

Richard Hundt said...

Idiosyncratic to whom?

I suppose the relevance is really that, like Links, the language machine is analytic, which - for me at least - makes it really interesting.

Moreover it's just a little bit `dirty' in a way that is good in that it allows you to inline imperative programming logic inside the rules, and generally get at its innards.

This means that unlike a `pure' or `clean' notation, it's more hackable since There is More Than One Way To Do It (TM) - which gives you expressive power and flexibility.

I think Peri's work is definitely worth taking a look at if you're programming in D or are tired of hand coding several thousand line lexers and parsers.

Richard Hundt said...

d'oh, I've just realised the source of the confusion (mine certainly) - `Link grammar' is an analytic grammar theory (as opposed to a generative grammar) which does of course have no bearing on `Links' and AJAX framework...