SealedSun.ch

One of the Cons about Coco/R is it’s lack of integration into the VS2005 IDE. Yes, I know that a plugin for #develop exists but I do not want to switch IDE (sorry, but VS2005 is far better).

For my purposes, a complete integration would consist of the following steps:

1. Attach PxCoco (the parser generator) to the Build button in VS2005.
2. Forward errors from PxCoco to VS2005.
3. Support multi-file grammars with proper error forwarding.
4. Map C# errors in the resulting parser class to the grammar file.
5. Provide intellisense (and all the other wonderful features in VS2005) for grammar files.

As of now I have done steps 1-3 and am planning to implement number 4. It would be really cool to have Coco/R grammar as a first class language in VS2005 but that would mean writing a complete language plugin for VS2005 that supports both, the grammar notation and C#, from scratch.

I’m thinking about releasing PxCoco or telling the authors of Coco/R about my extensions. But not before I got my damn prototype (Yes, I want to show off… ).

I have taken a screenshot. Look at the underlined variable name in the grammar definition, the list of warnings in the error tab and the corresponding grammar fragments in the project explorer.

Update (02/09/2007):

I just found out, that someone already wrote a VS add-in for Coco/R. Unfortunately this comes a bit too late for my Project as I have split up my grammer into multiple files and, as we all know, custom tools can only process a single file.

My implementation has some bugs: Due to the fact that I have to translate line numbers twice (grammar fragments > single grammar file > generated parser) I sometimes get the line numbers wrong… After countless debug sessions I finally decided to focus on my actual project, Prexonite.

My current solution is a mixture of custom MSBuild tasks and a hacked version of Coco/R.

Tags: Prexonite // 2 Comments »