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

[Paul Gearon]

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.

BUT... lexer definition files get to keep your own license, and any lexing
code produced by JFlex is *explicitly* not under the GPL.  This means we
could include the lexer definition file and the generated java source file,
but not the JFlex application which turned the former into the latter.  That
would leave us with 3 alternatives:
1. Include the .lex file and the generated .java file and leave some
documentation to tell potential modifiers of the .lex file where they can
find and download the JFlex application.
2. Include the .lex file and the generated .java file and create a step in
the build script to download and run JFlex if it isn't already available.
Several other projects already do this, so I know how to go about it.
3. Use something other than JFlex.

I don't like option 3, but it's probably the best one.  :-)

Regards,
Paul

On 10/24/06, David Wood <dwood at softwarememetics.com> wrote:
>
> On 24 Oct2006, at 12:33, Paul Gearon wrote:
>
> ... I've been playing with Beaver for SPARQL.  :-)  There is a licensing
> peculiarity which makes it tricky to use in the build script, but it can
> still be done.  The benefits in Beaver over SableCC have me thinking it may
> be worth it.
>
>
> What is the licensing peculiarity?  Beaver's SF project says it is under
> the BSD license...
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>
> --
> http://prototypo.blogspot.com
>
>
>
>
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