[Haskell-cafe] feasability of implementing an awk interpreter.

[John Lask]

On 20/08/2010 1:35 PM, Jason Dagit wrote:
fairly easy .. you might want to check out the following tutorial ...

http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools/ch5.html

he implements a basic grep tool, you might then want to check out one of
the regex packages as a basis for your implementation of awk.

>
>
> On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Michael Litchard <michael at schmong.org
> <mailto:michael at schmong.org>> wrote:
>
>     I'd like the community to give me feedback on the difficulty level of
>     implementing an awk interpreter. What language features would be
>     required? Specifically I'm hoping that TH is not necessary because I'm
>     nowhere near that skill level.
>
>
> I'd love to have portable pure haskell implementations of the
> traditional unix tools.  If it were done well, it would allow you to
> 'cabal install' yourself into a usable dev environment on windows :)
>   I'd much rather do that than deal with cygwin/mingw.
>
> Someone (was it Stephen Hicks?) was writing (or finished writing?) an sh
> parser and I got really excited for the same reason.  It would be a cool
> project, but I'm not sure I can justify to myself spending my spare
> cycles on it.
>
>
>
>     An outline of a possible approach would be appreciated. I am using
>     http://www.math.utah.edu/docs/info/gawk_toc.html
>     as a guide to the language description.
>
>
> I think this is a good opportunity for you to learn about monad
> transformers.  To that end, I think you will like this paper (quite easy
> for beginners to pick up):
> http://www.grabmueller.de/martin/www/pub/Transformers.en.html
>
> At least, that's how I first learned about them and I though it was easy
> to read at the time :)
>
> You might also want to read (and try) some of the tutorials that focus
> on creating interpreters just to sort of get some practice in that area.
>   I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about this one:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours
>
> You might also focus on the 'core' of awk.  Think about, what is the
> minimal language and start from there.  Grow your implementation adding
> features bit by bit.  It's also a good opportunity to do testing.  You
> have a reference implementation and so you can write lots of tests for
> each feature as you add them.
>
> I hope that helps,
> Jason
>
>
>
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