Writing a compiler for a DSL in python

Question

I am writing a game in python and have decided to create a DSL for the map data files. I know I could write my own parser with regex, but I am wondering if there are existing py

Answer 1

Peter,

DSLs are a good thing, so you don't need to defend yourself :-) However, have you considered an internal DSL ? These have so many pros versus external (parsed) DSLs that they're at least worth consideration. Mixing a DSL with the power of the native language really solves lots of the problems for you, and Python is not really bad at internal DSLs, with the with statement handy.

Answer 2

I have written something like this in work to read in SNMP notification definitions and automatically generate Java classes and SNMP MIB files from this. Using this little DSL, I could write 20 lines of my specification and it would generate roughly 80 lines of Java code and a 100 line MIB file.

To implement this, I actually just used straight Python string handling (split(), slicing etc) to parse the file. I find Pythons string capabilities to be adequate for most of my (simple) parsing needs.

Besides the libraries mentioned by others, if I were writing something more complex and needed proper parsing capabilities, I would probably use ANTLR, which supports Python (and other languages).