Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Time to remove "Experimental" label? #144

Open
cloojure opened this issue Aug 19, 2016 · 1 comment
Open

Time to remove "Experimental" label? #144

cloojure opened this issue Aug 19, 2016 · 1 comment

Comments

@cloojure
Copy link

Hi - Just started using Instaparse and I am loving it.

Looking at

:auto-whitespace :standard

and friends, it seems that this would be a core part of nearly all syntaxes that aren't insane (yes, I'm looking at you Python & YAML), and should no longer be labelled "experimental." Should this be considered a core part of Instaparse at this point?

Alan

@Engelberg
Copy link
Owner

The feature certainly works as advertised, but there are still some deeper issues I'd like to address. Some users have expressed that using auto-whitespace makes it easier to fall into certain ambiguity traps (particularly if you don't have a good underling mental model of what auto-whitespace is actually doing behind the scenes), and others have opined that there is no good way to express exceptions to the auto-whitespace rule -- it's currently an all-or-nothing thing.

So I still ponder whether there's a way to make auto-whitespace more generally useful.

Certainly one popular request is to allow instaparse to work on sequences of tokens, rather than just strings. If I implement this, it may make auto-whitespace unnecessary (since whitespace would disappear in the tokenization pass).

Realistically though, if I find something that subsumes auto-whitespace, I'd most likely just leave auto-whitespace in for backwards compatibility. So it's pretty safe to use, if it works for your needs (if that's what you're asking).

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants