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by Alan Knowles.
Original Post: PHP Grammer added to leds, and how to build leds
Feed Title: Smoking toooo much PHP
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I've spend quite a bit of time working on leds, specifically focusing on the autocompletion and help implementation for D and PHP, while the D is still ahead, in terms of cross file lookup, autocompletion and display of docbook comments, PHP is beginning to catch up.
The major part of autocompletion for PHP is dealing with the grammer parser (as I blogged before that I had done a pretty much perfect tokenizer). For this I took alot of inspiration from the D parser in dante. Which used for me, anyway, a rather creative method of parsing the language into Components.
In principle it breaks the language down into simple parts
files
classes
methods
codeblock (code inbetween { and })
statements something ending in ";" ,or "while ( ) { }" (which is a statement with a codeblock)
the parser method, basically relies on each class to find all it's subcomponents, then let's the subcomponent determine where it starts and ends. - relying on the file to store the pointer to the current position in the list of tokens.
The result is a very simple to write grammer parser, that can be grown organically, rather than the classic grammer parser that depends on the need to fully document every pattern in the language.
When I originally started this post, it was intended as install instructions for leds. which are included in the extended body. And also partly as a reference for me to get it up and going quickly on other machines. The documentation uses Makefiles (as you would use with C), however, after having chatted to Antonio Moneiro, the original author of leds, he had been working on a compile tool (compd).
This compile tool negated the need for makefiles, as it basically worked out what commands to run to build an application, by just being given the files to build, binary library paths and source library paths (bit like .h files in C)
This solved alot of the issues which the rather hacked together makefiles creates, but didnt solve the major problem. That you need to install the libraries in specific places, or modify the build command to help it find the libraries. eg. leds, uses libraries dantefw, dool, dui (GTK) and has to know where you have built those libraries, and where the source is.
So with a little bit of hacking, I added code to the build tool, such that when it has built the library, it writes a list of file paths and dependant libraries to either ~/.compd/{libname}.compd or /etc/compd/{libname}.compd.
Then for example when building leds, you just tell it that you need -ldantefw, it will look in /etc/compd/libdantefw, and find where you compiled the library to, and all the include paths. - hence you no longer need to specify paths anymore, and applications and libraries just build. without editing make files or using autoconf.
In addition we are still discussing how we can make it run more like "make", where it picks up a file in the current working directory, and uses that as it's arguments. so making leds would be as simple as typing "compd", or "compd -f leds.compd"
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