Re: Using of parse tree externally

[Lee Iverson <leei at Canada dot AI dot SRI dot COM>]

[I've cc'ed this to the unrev-ii@egroups.com mailing list.  For those
 of you seeing this there, this is a response to a discussion of a
 suggestion to provide XML output of the parse tree created by the GCC
 compiler suite. -- leei]

In message <20001019082036K.mitchell@codesourcery.com>, Mark Mitchell writes:
>>>>>> "Dupont," == Dupont, Michael <michael.dupont@mciworldcom.de> writes:
>
>    Dupont,> Hi Marc, Gaby.
>
>    Dupont,> I am still thinking about how I am going to publish my
>    Dupont,> work properly.
>
>    Dupont,> The work that I have done so far is :
>
>The mode that would be most interesting would be dumping the tree
>nodes as XML.  That facilitates a lot of things.

It certainly does.  It is of course the easiest way to enable almost
all of the *dangerous* possibilities being discussed.

Another tactic would be to only dump cross-referencing info in XML.

One of the greatest difficulties we have in discussing and documenting
software is the difficulty in linking those documents to the source
code in a meaningful and transparent manner.  Consider the usefulness
in having a means of publishing sources in a form whereby it is
trivially possible to navigate from source to documentation to
discussion and back.  We'd potentially be able to combine the
advantages of literate programming, cvsweb and structured external
documentation to hopefully make all of our jobs easier.

Why does there need to be compiler support for this?  Well, for C++ at
least and inhertance-based object-oriented languages in general it can
be extremely difficult to accumulate good cross-referencing
information external to the compiler.  You just have to duplicate too
much of the compiler's work.

Where am I going with this?  Mark knows.  If we can come up with a
decent, flexible, language-independent XML DTD for source-code
cross-referencing then we can dump this information from the compiler
and build other tools to allow use to fully XMLize the sources with
this cross-referencing info.  Given that, we'd have a way to
incorporate actual sources directly into discussions and documentation
via hyperlinking.

There are open sourcce projects that are moving in this direction.
The SDS (http://sds.sourceforge.net) is definitely moving in this
direction, and they'd benefit greatly from such an effort.

Of much more potential long-term benefit is the Open Hyperdocument
System (OHS) project being led by Doug Engelbart (see
http://bootstrap.org, the unrev-ii list on http://egroups.com and
http://ohs.sourceforge.net) which is about collaborative document
management and community building. The targeted bootstrap strategy for
the OHS group places the augmentation of open source software
development at the core of its mission.

Anyone else interested?  I know Mark Mitchell and I are.

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Lee Iverson     		SRI International
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