On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 02:03:03PM +1200, Russell Fulton wrote: > I've kept my head down for most of the discussion because I could see > that others knew far more about the basic issues than I did. I hope others aren't doing this as well; more people participating in the discussion can only help it. My comp. sci. background is very weak, for example, especially with regards to the languages that are best suited to writing parsers (more on that in a second); having folks with actual comp. sci. backgrounds and the like participating would at worst give us some different viewpoints that might lead to alternate ways to approach the problem. Speaking of which... > While looking at the books on my shelf this morning a thought occurred > to me: Has anyone considered ICON http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ as a > possible implementation language for a log parser? Almost certainly > not! I actually had thought of ICON briefly, simply because it came up a lot when I first started looking into writing parsers. Also on the list of languages like that are a lot of functional languages, like LISP and ML. I personally don't intend to _learn_ all of those languages, but one thing I've discovered over the last couple of years is that each language makes doing certain things easy and as a result programmers in each language learn lots of different ways to solve the same problem. So I've read enough stuff on, for example, functional programming that I now have Yet Another way of attacking the problem of parsing something. That's where, at least for me, things like ICON would be most useful--programmers in a procedural language that makes parsing easy have probably already invented a lot of the wheels that I find myself inventing while parsing with another (ostensibly) procedural language like, say, Perl. As I said earlier in the thread, my current focus is on developing the grammars that will let programmers in any language parse log messages; since I'm most familiar with Perl, then, most of my prototyping will probably end up being done in that language. But I'd love to see someone take some of those grammars and implement them in, say, ICON, just to see what the result is like--things like that can only help grow the knowledge base of the entire community. And (as Marcus would be quick to point out, I'm sure :) ) until that first version is hacked out in ICON, there's no way of knowing for sure whether or not ICON might not just be the most appropriate tool for the job in the long run. (Basically: I personally don't have a problem with the "I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mentality, so long as it's really just a "I have a hammer, I wonder what I can learn by using it to try to cut this two-by-four?" mentality. The worst that can happen then is that people learn not to use a hammer to cut; the best that can happen is that it turns out that cutting wood with a hammer is easier than it is with a saw.) > ICON is the brainchild of Ralph Griswold (one of the authors of Snobol > -- yes, I'm showing my age, does anyone else remember Snobol?) Well, I wouldn't say I _remember_ Snobol, but I'm _aware_ of it... does that count? :) > ICON is > a great langage for building parsers, it is interpretive and has > powerful string manipulation facilities built in. It also has the > concept or goal evaluation and backtracking built into the language. > There is a section of ["The ICON Programming Language" by Griswold and > Griswold; Prenice Hall; ISBN 0-13-447889-4] devoted to writing parsers > in the chapter on "strings and pattern matching". If anyone is interested, it appears that the Griswolds are having a clearance sale on their stock of this book, so it only costs $17 (with free shipping in N. America) through the end of June; details are on the website noted above. I'll probably be getting a copy myself, at that price... > The down side, of course is that it is relatively unknown and (so far as > I know) does not have a wide support base like perl, python etc. It doesn't need to be in wide use to help us; all it needs to do is have at least a few clueful folks (perhaps you and your 4th years? :) ) to use it to attack the problem, see what comes of it, and then share their results. -- Sweth. -- Sweth Chandramouli Idiopathic Systems Consulting svcat_private http://www.idiopathic.net/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: loganalysis-unsubscribeat_private For additional commands, e-mail: loganalysis-helpat_private
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