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Re: Announcing Ox release 1.10.1

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Howdy, Roger, responses to your questions below:
> On Feb 7, 2022, at 1:21 PM, Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
>
> Hello Tom,
>
> I have a few questions about Ox:
>
> 1. Is there a complete, up-to-date, easy-to-read Ox manual?

Kurt Bischoff, the original (primary?) Ox developer at Iowa State University,
wrote a tutorial (dtd 5 Nov 1993) and a reference manual (dtd 14 Nov 1993).

I have attempted to keep both documents current as I’ve expanded on the
original Ox functionality - the reference manual more extensively than the
tutorial.  Both documents are in the ‘./docs’ distribution directory, in
both PDF and in LaTeX source form.

I believe that both documents are current, although it is certainly possible
that I’ve missed something.  To date, this is a one-man labor of love ;-)

As to whether the documents are “easy-to-read”, you will have to be the
judge of that.

I suspect that the reference manual might be considered a bit cryptic if one
isn’t already familiar with attribute grammars.  Furthermore, the
limitations of the current Ox translator (in particular, allowing arbitrary
C/C++ code in an attribute's definition), make it easy to create hidden
attribute dependencies that will randomly break the Ox-generated code.

I’m open to constructive comments from users, but so far no one has said
anything to me directly.


> 2. Are there any published books on Ox?

No … do you want to write one?

The original Ox distribution includes an example compiler for a small
programming language, GPPL, built using Ox (and originally Yacc and Lex).  The
compiler generates C source code.  I have maintained the GPPL compiler, but
only to the extent required to enable it to compile, link & execute.

Kurt Bischoff wrote a report describing the compiler: "GPPL: A Small
Block-Structured Imperative Programming Language Implemented using Ox”, Iowa
State University TR#92-32, December, 1992.  A Postscript file of that document
from Kurt’s last known Ox distribution is in the ‘./gppl’ distribution
directory.


> 3. Is there an Ox group on Stack Overflow?

Not that I am aware of.

I did a search just now on the Stack Overflow web and only found 2 questions
that were obviously about Ox, both from the same user in April & May of 2021.
I guess I should investigate how to set up a trigger to get notified of future
Ox questions.


> 4. Are there any commercial products that were developed using Ox?

Not to my knowledge.  I don’t get much user feedback, save for the
infrequent bug report.

According to the SourceForge server, there have been a total of 472 downloads
of the various Ox distribution files since December 2018, which was when I
first registered the project.  That tells me is there is a non-trivial level
of interest, so I’ve kept at it.

Regards,

Tom Shields

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Announcing Ox release 1.10.1 Tom Shields <thomas.evans.shields@gmail.com> - 2022-02-02 13:27 -0600
  Re: Announcing Ox release 1.10.1 Tom Shields <thomas.evans.shields@gmail.com> - 2022-02-07 20:46 -0600

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