[Mulgara-dev] /org/mulgara/itql and sablecc

Paul Gearon gearon at ieee.org
Tue Oct 24 21:24:38 UTC 2006


Hi,

On 10/24/06, David Wood <dwood at softwarememetics.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Paul,<rant>
> Hmph.  I sure hope the FSF gets the GPL v3 right, because this sort of
> nonsense among OSS projects has to stop.
> </rant>
>

I agree wholeheartedly.  In fact, it really bothers me that Ian felt the
need to ask about our license.  I want community projects (like ours) to
*enable* people to do new and interesting things.  Seeing these licenses
create impediments instead is disheartening.

Ideally all the work we enable would be in the community, where everyone
benefit from each other's contributions, but I fully understand the need to
keep some things proprietary.  I like licenses like the LGPL, MPL, and OSL
for allowing third parties to create "nearby" code under their own control,
while also keeping the original project open.  I suppose it's not easy to
write a license which enforces the "spirit" of this intent, as people are
always pushing for the license to abide by their own self-interested
interpretations.


I am fine with your options #1 and #2 if you really want to use Beaver.  I
> like #2 better, although the use of the build target would have to be
> clearly documented.
>

I like #2 as well.  Ultimately, I'd do it that way if I needed to use
JFlex.  I only suggested #1 as a way to get things up quickly.  After all,
at this point there are only likely to be about 3 or 4 people who'd want to
run JFlex to re-generate the .java file, and I can explain it to each of
them.  OK, OK, so this is just me being lazy.  :-)


How close are you and Andrae to choosing a parser/lexer?
>

Errr, I'm just playing with a SPARQL implementation at the moment, so I'm
not committed to anything.  Since Andrae has made most of SPARQL parse in
iTQL then I sort of assumed he would just go that route.

Longer term, I really think we should change, and I know that Andrae hates
SableCC.  There aren't many LALR parsers for Java out there.  The ones
Wikipedia knows about are:
SableCC    (LGPL)
Beaver    (BSD)
BYACC/J    (Public domain)
CUP    (GPL)
Jay    (BSD)
Jacc    (BSD)

Interestingly, they ALL require an external lexer (except SableCC), and
several of them mandate that this lexer must be JFlex.  So Beaver doesn't
suffer by comparison at all.  Going on anecdotes on mailing lists, Beaver
seems to be one of the most popular (other than CUP, which is GPL).  Having
played with Beaver for a bit, I quite like it.

Paul
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