[grammarians] Comparison to RubyFront grammar

[MenTaLguY]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 23:49 -0500, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> - What's the state of the RubyGrammar project? How much code can it 
> parse today? (especially in light of the recent contributions)

It's really sort of a meta-project, with our ultimate deliverable being
a formal specification of the grammar, producing a useful ANTLR 3
reference grammar as part of that process.  We've got some incomplete
parsers in SVN, but none of those are "the" RubyGrammar grammar at this
point.

> - How does it compare to the RubyFront grammar? I'm no grammarian, but 
> at a glance that one appeared to be more complete, and was able to parse 
> the entire stdlib (though I have no idea about accuracy).

The RubyFront grammar is by far the most complete of any of the ANTLR
grammars I've seen.

> - Is this project still being actively worked? If I have grammarians 
> interested in helping, should I point them at rubygrammar or rubyfront? 
> (I know of a few such folks inside and outside of Sun standing by)

Well, RubyFront would certainly be a good basis, but as far as I know
(Xue Yong Zhi, please correct me if I'm wrong), RubyFront is just a
component of the XRuby project.

If JRuby also plans to use it, then you should think about either
merging JRuby and XRuby, or factoring RubyFront out into a separate
project so that other Ruby implementation projects could use it easily
(ZeroOneInfinity and all that).

If you guys do feel it's best to factor out RubyFront, I'd be happy to
provide the The Ruby Grammar Project, its SVN repository, and its
mailing list as a home for the effort, and provide what material
assistance I can, including making people project admins.

I'm just here to facilitate this Ruby Grammar thing.  As long as it gets
done I'm not too particular about the details.

-mental
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