| [/============================================================================== |
| Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Joel de Guzman |
| Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Hartmut Kaiser |
| |
| Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying |
| file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) |
| ===============================================================================/] |
| |
| [section Quick Start] |
| |
| [heading Why would you want to use Spirit.Qi?] |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| 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. |
| |
| Have fun! |
| |
| [endsect] [/ Quickstart] |
