Clojurians Log v2

👋 Hi everyone!

I'm completely new to both instaparse and EBNF. Right now, I'm trying to create some docs that show the difference in core.async between Clojure and ClojureScript. I started by manually looking through the code in each repo and translating the available defns to markdown to show a simple matrix of which features/primitives are available in the cooresponding libraries. Of course I started thinking: "I could use some regex to do this, can't I?" I then asked myself "is there a better way in Clojure?" and found instaparse. Can anyone refer me to a good guide for building my own "EBNF" grammar?

btw, http://instaparse-live.matt.is/ is awesome

@loganpowell Why not just read the clojure code as data? I mean lisp code IS data, there's no need to deal with string parsing

how would I pull out the pieces of the function definitions as strings?

I'm converting it to markdown

just print it to string

haha, I'm very stupid. That's a great idea

you might want pprint actually, since it's for docs

ok, so I get the string that way, then how do I pull out the specific parts of that string that I need?

well first parse the whole thing into data with the built-in read function

manipulate the data as much as you want then print it

hmm... let me give that a shot!

@loganpowell if you need more advanced code analysis, check out tools.analyzer

https://github.com/clojure/tools.analyzer

I'm using cljs, works the same?

you mean the read part or analyser?

both

former is called cljs.reader/read-string in cljs

latter I have no idea if it works in cljs (I'm gonna guess no)

is reader a part of core or do I need to add it as a :dependency?

it's built-in

cool

it's working 🙂 I was getting all excited about instaparse... now I have to calm down my curiosity and get to work 😄

do I use core.match with this?

Haha, I suppose building a parser yourself would be a great learning exercise too.... but code grammar is a bit complex.

it looks as so, you're right

You can use whatever tools you want to process the data, it's just a list

ok, let me give it a go

yeah, Instaparse only aims to help turn strings into data, so if you already have a way to do that (`read-string`) then instaparse won't be much help

the "analysis" of your resulting data is always left as an exercise to the reader anyway 🙂