Question

I’m using boost::spirit to write a parser, lexer

here is what i want to do. i want to put functions and classes into data structures with the variables they use. so i want to know what would be the best way to do this.

and what parts of boost::spirit would be best to use for this?

the languages i want to use this on are C/C++/C#/Objective C/Objective C++.

also the language I’m writing it in is C++ only i’m not to good with the other languages i know

Answer 1

Spirit is a fine tool, but it is not the best tool for all parsing tasks. And for the task of parsing actual C++, it is pretty terrible.

Spirit excels at small-to-mid-level parsing tasks. Language that are fairly regular, with standardized grammars and so forth. C and C-derived languages are generally too complicated for Spirit to handle. It’s not that you can’t write Spirit parsing code for them. It’s just that doing so would be too difficult to build and maintain, given Spirit’s general design.

I would suggest downloading Clang if you want a good C or C++ (or Objective variants thereof) parser. It is a compiler as well, but it’s designed to be modular, so you can just link to the parsing part of it.