I need to write such a parser.

I have a system written in a proprietary language, for which there are no external parsers unless I write one.

I have a huge file (28MB , 1.5 million lines) which resembles in format a XML file, but it's not really XML, but a variation in tagging program elements.

Should I partition the huge file in smaller units before trying to run a MSE parser on it?

Or should the huge grammar parser work?

I can approach any of the two paths.

I think that once everything is inside the meta-model (which I'll have to write too later) , it is of little importance if the data came from a huge file , or if it came from two thousand smaller files. Am I right?

How big a model can get?

Hope this helps helping me :-)

Additionally, the semantics of the proprietary language I'm trying to parse is procedural. It's not object oriented.

One of my goals, is to reegineer the procedural code so that it can be abstracted, and made object oriented in some other open source language, like, say, python, or whichever fits. That would involve a 'writer' from the transformations on the model, which is fine.

The transformations on the model might rely on some already existent tools in moose, as well as on hand-made tools adapted to the idiosyncracies of this language.

I'm looking for general help on this big picture process. I'm willing to deal with the details myself, and ask for help if I get stuck :-)

Haroldo

2013/2/21 Haroldo Stenger <haroldo.stenger@gmail.com>

hi again !

2013/2/19 Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com>

1. At http://www.moosetechnology.org/download
2. Download moose 4.7 'moose.zip' file. Unzip this to any folder XXX and you see three files.
    a. moose.image - is the smalltalk program, including pharo & moose additions
    b. moose.changes - is like a transaction log - it records changes in method source so that if the image crashes before you save it, you can roll forward changes from the last save.
    c. moose.st - actually I don't know what this does. I've never had to do anything with it directly.
3. Follow the link through to http://www.pharo-project.org/pharo-download
    Under 'Virtual Machines' choose Cog-linux.zip - which will download nbcog-linux-latest.zip. This is the CogVM with a few extensions named NativeBoost for calling out to C libraries.
    Drag the entire contents of the VM zip file into the same XXX folder as the image.
4. From your other Pharo installation, find the PharoV10.sources file and also drop that into the XXX folder.
5. Now on Windows I would just double-click NBCogVM.exe. You should be able to determine what to do on Linux from looking at the Moose.sh file from the Moose-4.6-One-Click.

hope that helps smooth the way,

I'm running moose ! I'm happy I could reach this point. Your tutorial works great.

Now I'll need to grasp the basics in here. I'll be googling and navigating the moose site. Anyway, would you like to further soomth my way , feel free to :-)

thank you very much

Haroldo