Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:

> But as jr alluded to, the parser is the biggest monster to be slain in
> this software.  It's a recursive descent algorithm and very inflexible.

As this applies to most anything in life:
Hope is not a plan.
No one is coming to save you/us.
Skills are more valuable than things.

As I have brought up in the past, it would probably be a good idea to look
outside of the tiny little corner of the internet that we frequent, and try to
find someone amongst the many academic and commercial computer science people
that use POV-Ray for some purpose, and ask if they can have a student write out
the basic framework of a modern (LR-style?) parser to get things firmly started
in the proper direction.

In the absence of that, what are your thoughts on beginning to write out THE NEW
parser amongst ourselves?  I have seen that someone has already begun doing such
a thing, and perhaps we can all build on whatever contributions people can
offer.

WFP is already writing yuqk.
jr and I have Stroustrup's tome.
Plenty of people are capable of writing some level of code - be it in SDL or
some other language.

Even if we simply start sketching out the framework, others can come in and fill
in the blanks.

I mean, even if the code doesn't actually DO anything and it's just blocks of
comments describing what should be done at each step - we can still write what
amounts to an operational flowchart, where we can just output a summary of what
the code WOULD do if there was functional code in the framework.

- BW

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