Re: [SMARTY-DEV] Smarty compiler

> The overhead of regular expressions isn't such a big issue, it only does > this at compile time. I see many drawbacks with a compiled solution, > some already mentioned. Maybe I've misunderstood it all, but who says you have to write a C-version of smarty to do this? Since the grammar in smarty is very simple, you can write a basic token-based parser in PHP that does what we want, and doesn't _limit_ us with what regexps can do. I don't care about the speed at all when compiling, but I think we are limited by the way Smarty works now. Let's say that you want to add the ability to use: {$myvar + 5} in a template. Right now you have to rewrite 5 complex regular expressions to even allow simple math to not be completely cut off in this expression. With a real compiler it wouldn't be that difficult at all to add this feature (theoretically). > One other would be the ability for everyone to > contribute plugins/patches, etc. I'm sure there are a lot more php-savvy > users than there are C-savvy, and we'd be cutting our own throats by > limiting who can contribute. Plugins would still be allowed in my way. I have swept together a smarty-compatible (no, not at all ;) parser written in PHP that generates a tree from a given source file. I guess I don't have to tell you that it's far easier to use the tree to generate good PHP-code compared to now. Look at http://p22.ryd.student.liu.se/~yweb/pc/ I didn't write it, but one of my codevelopers. // Victor (PS, this is somewhat what the code looks like $components["text"]["container"] = false; $components["b"]["container"] = true; $components["link"]["container"] = false; $components["counter"]["container"] = false; $data = "{{ Hi, this is \"a string\" and this is {b}something in bold. Not that {this tag} doesn't get parsed.{/b}. This is a {link url=\"http://www.google.com\" title=\"link\"/} escaped in XML syntax (do we want that? - it's possible anyway!) and this is a {counter cheat=100} counter"; $parser = new Parser($components); $tree = $parser->parse($data); print_r($tree); )