[boost] Announcing: xpressive

From: Eric Niebler (eric_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-16 21:52:11

I have begun work on a new library. It is beginning life as a regular 
expression pattern matcher, though I plan to morph it into something 
more powerful and general. I am hoping spark the interest of some 
developers, Spirit developers in particular, to make sure that the new 
library plays well with the rest of Boost. The working title for the 
project is "xpressive".

xpressive will have the following features:

- rules (aka, regular expressions) can be written as strings
- rules can also be written as expression templates
- when written as a string, the rule is bound dynamically
- when written as an expression template, the rule is bound statically
   for full inlining and optimzation.
- both statically and dynamically bound rules will be built from the
   same core components.
- rules will be able to nest and call each other recursively.
- it will be possible to bind an action to a rule and have that action
   execute when the rule succeeds (a-la Spirit)

Here is a sample usage:
using namespace xpressive;
parser p;
regex rx;

// dynamically bound
rx = p.parse( "(hello )+world" );

// statically bound
rx = +(_1 = "hello ") >> "world";

The two rules above are equivalent; they both match "hello " repeatedly, 
storing the result in capture number 1, and then match "world".

The inspiration for xpressive comes from Spirit, Boost.Regex, GRETA and 
the Perl 6 regular expression redesign, described by Larry Wall in 
Apocalypse 5 (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html). IMO, the 
Apocalypse is excellent reading for anyone who wants to expand their 
mind about what regular expressions can and should be good for.

xpressive will differ from Spirit in that it will have backtracking 
semantics. (Spirit has greedy semantics, and does not do backtracking.) 
Also, it will allow rules to be defined at runtime via a string, 
accepted from a user or read from a file.

The project is still quite small. I have checked the source code into 
the boost sandbox at boost-sandbox/boost/xpressive for anybody who is 
interested.  Joel de Guzman has already expressed interest, and we plan 
to collaborate once he finds some free time.

Is anybody else interested?

--
Eric Niebler
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com