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

Andrae Muys andrae at netymon.com
Tue Oct 24 22:43:14 UTC 2006


On 25/10/2006, at 8:30 AM, peter royal wrote:

> On Oct 24, 2006, at 1:39 PM, Paul Gearon wrote:
>> Beaver is fine, but it's a parser only.  You need a separate  
>> lexer.  The only lexer I found that works with Beaver was JFlex  
>> (though I did not look exhaustively).
>>
>> JFlex is GPL, meaning we can't include it with Mulgara.
>
> That seems odd.. JFlex/Beaver both generate code that is not under  
> their license as their output, and since that's all that Mulgara's  
> java code will ever see, I'm not sure there's a problem?
>
> Basically, since the GPL code would only be used as a build-time  
> utility, its not triggering any virility.  People building Mulgara  
> from source will need to run the GPL'd code, but users of a binary  
> distribution will only ever encountered the generated artifacts and  
> won't need any GPL code at runtime.

That is my understanding of the JFlex license as well - I'm pretty  
sure we don't have a problem here.

That being said, my current preference is either JFlex/Beaver or  
JFlex/CUP.  There is a patch I've promised the jflex maintainer that  
I would like to see rolled in before we go too far down this road -  
but if anyone is really keen to get started, it won't be hard to  
adjust later.  The patch improves JFlex's support for character  
classes, which at the moment is rather limited. I've started it, but  
it isn't finished because I was distracted doing Mulgara :).

Andrae

-- 
Andrae Muys
andrae at netymon.com
Principal Mulgara Consultant
Netymon Pty Ltd





More information about the Mulgara-dev mailing list