This past Saturday I went to visit with some other Ruby programmers. I bought Michael Granger's dinner at a nice Indian restaurant in exchange for a mini-tutorial on how to use a grammar/lexer. For our purposes, we used racc to parse a tnsnames.ora file. During this process we discovered two things: racc ain't very good (too much work compared to other tools) and the official rules for a tnsnames.ora file are kinda dumb.
Despite that, I still got a pretty good general feel for just how one goes about creating a grammar. Enough to strike out on my own, at least. Oh, and Michael is working on a Ruby port of Parse::RecDescent. Actually, I think it's done, but it's dirt slow.
While I was over there I got to see his new Mac OSX laptop. Ooooh....aaahhh. Very, very nice. It was so cool, I may yet buy one someday. After reading about the 970 benchmarks today, I think I'll wait until that chip is out. :)
