Re: Reminder: Review for Zach's parsing library starts on Feb 19th

From: Zach Laine (whatwasthataddress_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-02-24 01:20:51

On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 4:36 PM Christian Mazakas via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>

[snip]

> ### The Feedback
>
> The differences between Spirit.X3 and Parser need to be made much more
> clear by the
> documentation, by which I mean:
> > * Spirit X3 has rules that do not compose well — the attributes produced
> by a rule can change depending on the context in which you use the rule.

I will add this to the docs as well, but I thought I'd post here an
example of what I was referring to above.  Here is a complete program
using X3:

#include <boost/spirit/home/x3.hpp>

#include <iostream>
#include <set>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

namespace x3 = boost::spirit::x3;
using ints_type = x3::rule<class ints, std::vector<int>>;
BOOST_SPIRIT_DECLARE(ints_type);

x3::rule<class ints, std::vector<int>> ints = "ints";
constexpr auto ints_def = x3::int_ % ',';
BOOST_SPIRIT_DEFINE(ints);

#define FIXED_ATTRIBUTE 0

int main()
{
    std::string input = "43, 42";
    auto first = input.begin();
    auto const last = input.end();
#if FIXED_ATTRIBUTE
    std::vector<int> result;
#else
    std::set<int> result;
#endif
    bool success = x3::phrase_parse(first, last, ints, x3::space, result);
    if (success) {
        // We want this to print "43 42\n".
        for (auto x : result) {
            std::cout << x << ' ';
        }
        std::cout << "\n";
    }

    return 0;
}

IMO, the problem with this is that, even though I specified a vector
as the rule's attribute type, I can feed the rule a set (#define
FIXED_ATTRIBUTE 1), and it happily populates it with the parsed
values.  Note that this sorts, and in this case reorders, the values.
I think this looseness is important in many cases, but there's no way
to turn it off in X3.  In Parser the way to turn it off is to use a
rule instead of a parser.  My inability to disable this looseness
resulted in wrong results in an X3 YAML parser I was working on.  I
really loved so much of the design of X3, that my frustration with
this problem was a pretty big part of the motivation for writing
Parser.

Zach