Re: [office-formula] Spec tweaks

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

robert_weir
> General question -- has anyone done a formal analysis of our expression 
> language?  Especially with recent tweaks and extensions, it would be great 
> to throw this all into LEX/YAAC (or whatever tool is used for this these 
> days) and confirm that we're not getting conflicts.

I've started putting this into bison/flex, which is a common such toolset.
My incomplete work is here:
  http://www.dwheeler.com/openformula

I'm getting several errors in the portion for cell reference handling.
I'll try to track that down (though if others want to help, great!).

> Also, did we have any explicit target for the complexity of grammar we 
> wanted, whether LALR, LR(k), GLR, or whatever?

I've been assuming that we should approach this the same way
most programming languages are defined.  IE, we should use
a powerful BNF language in the spec that makes it easy to understand,
but one that is TRANSLATABLE to something easily handled
by LALR(1)-type tools at least (e.g., yacc/bison and flex/lex).

--- David A. Wheeler