Re: [boost] Review Xpressive

From: Eric Niebler (eric_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-25 20:28:19

Joel de Guzman wrote:
> Tom Brinkman wrote:
> 
> 
>>* What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?
>>
>>As others have indicated, there is some overlap with other boost libraries.
>>However, the emphasis of xpressive is different and
>>somewhat more flexible.
> 
> 
> Flexible in what way please? ;-)
> I should know, so I could steal that "flexibility" :P

Certainly I would like to hear Tom's answer. But your question reminds 
me that that I've spent some time describing how xpressive is different 
than Boost.Regex, but none describing how it's different than Spirit. In 
no particular order:

- Rather than relying exclusively on expression templates, which are 
fixed at compile time, xpressive lets you write patterns as strings as 
well, so you can specify than at runtime or read them from an 
initialization file.

- xpressive has exhaustive backtracking semantics, which you can 
selectively turn off using the keep() directive. Spirit doesn't have an 
exhaustive backtracking option.

- xpressive::regex, unlike spirit::rule, has normal value semantics so 
you can copy them and put them in std containers.

- xpressive::regex keeps its referenced regexes alive via reference 
counting, so you can never have a dangling reference. spirit::rule 
doesn't, nor does spirit::grammar<> IIUC.

Taken together, it means you can pretty quickly and easily put together 
a grammar in an ad hoc manner.

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