This morning, after putting in some extra hours I got the first iteration of my CSS parser working. Originally I had made seven example selectors that manually placed into my cssSheet API to test out how my "trees of selectors" would work out. After thoroughly debugging these methods, I went ahead and spent some hours on how the parser's actions behaves. Originally I thought I was in hot water because I would only be passing around one selector, but thanks to the way the grammar behaves, it actually worked, and parsed a test css sheet that contained these same examples! It was very exciting.
Also the fact that this worked with multiple selectors floating around within the grammar gives me hope for implementing things like the wildcard selector and giving multiple selectors the same set of properties in one declaration. Honestly, because ANTLR and grammars are so powerful, these things could possibly work already-- but that's providing my code plays nice. Anyways, the next step will be implementing the parser into the engine, and then I imagine I'll be maintaining it both through our enhancement and in the future. But I don't mind. I think ANTLR is cool, and I like working with it. I really felt the pressure from the deadlines I've been working under, but I'd like to make parsers a regular part of my programming diet. There's this magical moment where you're mentally considering only so many cases, and your completed parser readily handles so many more. It makes you want to attribute some intelligence to the design that isn't there at all-- it's just a beautiful structure.
Sorry for being sappy.
Also the fact that this worked with multiple selectors floating around within the grammar gives me hope for implementing things like the wildcard selector and giving multiple selectors the same set of properties in one declaration. Honestly, because ANTLR and grammars are so powerful, these things could possibly work already-- but that's providing my code plays nice. Anyways, the next step will be implementing the parser into the engine, and then I imagine I'll be maintaining it both through our enhancement and in the future. But I don't mind. I think ANTLR is cool, and I like working with it. I really felt the pressure from the deadlines I've been working under, but I'd like to make parsers a regular part of my programming diet. There's this magical moment where you're mentally considering only so many cases, and your completed parser readily handles so many more. It makes you want to attribute some intelligence to the design that isn't there at all-- it's just a beautiful structure.
Sorry for being sappy.
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