TAS Must Die, Chapter 13

Here's where I'm heading. The square boxes below are programs. The ovals are lexers or other output files. The round-corner boxes are input files that will be consumed by lexers.

L1Gen is the hand-coded lexer generator. It produces L1, a lexer for lexer descriptions. L1 produces the tokens that allow P1 to read a lexer description and produce a lexer. L2 is a lexer that tokenizes iscript files. P2 is a parser that will use L2, ingest an iscript source file, and produce pcode that is the logical equivalent of the iscript source file. The TASMustDie servlet will ingest the pcode and produce HTML which is lobbed at the browser. I expect the servlet will be non-trivial and implement the Command and Factory design patterns. Basically, the servlet sucks in the pcode, rips through it by line, and invokes the Factory to produce Command instances. Now we have an executable version of the textual pcode.

Everything through and including L2 is working as far as I can tell. So now I should start writing P2 and designing the Pcode. Iscript isn't very tricky until we get to the point where we have to communicate with the Tandem. Then the syntax gets a little different. So I probably have more lexer work in my future. For all that I don't forsee and difficulties. I mean, what could possibly go wrong??!

I'm taking a breather now. So far, the lexer generator is working. I'll probably create a pretty brutal test of it soon. This will involve creating a iscript lexer (L2 in the diagram) using L1Gen's lexer, and creating an alternative to L1Gen's using the third iteration of a bootstrapped lexer. I can probably run 10,000 tokens through each one, easy. If the output streams aren't the same, there's a problem.