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| <div class="titlepage"><div><div><h4 class="title"> |
| <a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start"></a><a class="link" href="quick_start.html" title="Quick Start">Quick Start</a> |
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| <a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_"></a><h6> |
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| <a class="link" href="quick_start.html#spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_">Why |
| would you want to use Spirit.Qi?</a> |
| </h6> |
| <p> |
| Spirit.Qi is designed to be a practical parsing tool. The ability to generate |
| a fully-working parser from a formal EBNF specification inlined in C++ |
| significantly reduces development time. Programmers typically approach |
| parsing using ad hoc hacks with primitive tools such as scanf. Even regular-expression |
| libraries (such as boost regex) or scanners (such as Boost tokenizer) do |
| not scale well when we need to write more elaborate parsers. Attempting |
| to write even a moderately-complex parser using these tools leads to code |
| that is hard to understand and maintain. |
| </p> |
| <p> |
| One prime objective is to make the tool easy to use. When one thinks of |
| a parser generator, the usual reaction is "it must be big and complex |
| with a steep learning curve." Not so. Spirit is designed to be fully |
| scalable. The library is structured in layers. This permits learning on |
| an as-needed basis, after only learning the minimal core and basic concepts. |
| </p> |
| <p> |
| For development simplicity and ease in deployment, the entire library consists |
| of only header files, with no libraries to link against or build. Just |
| put the Spirit distribution in your include path, compile and run. Code |
| size? -very tight -essentially comparable to hand written recursive descent |
| code. |
| </p> |
| <p> |
| Our tutorials will walk you through the simplest Spirit examples, incrementally |
| building on top of the earlier examples as we expose more and more features |
| and techniques. We will try to be as gentle as possible with the learning |
| curve. We will present the tutorials in a cookbook style approach. This |
| style of presentation is based on our BoostCon '07 and BoostCon '08 slides. |
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| Have fun! |
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| <td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2001-2010 Joel de Guzman, Hartmut Kaiser<p> |
| Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying |
| file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>) |
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