Last week started as a “going to do some Go” week, but quickly, some posts and articles about recent language issues (in French originally) with gender-neutrality adaptation (and often consecutive dismissal or refusal) sent me through the rabbit hole of linguistics, translations and language creation.
And here I was, deciding to start a new project (again!), this time about the creation of a gender-neutral language called Neutro. I started pondering what the language would like and quickly built a new page where I’d detail the steps of this creation.
At some point, confronted with grammar and vocabulary choices, I realized it would likely be convenient to build translators to and from English for Neutro, like some kind of TDD (Test-Driven Development), and I started digging back into lex/flex-yacc/bison and how to do that in Go (because, why do that in C if I can practice Go instead…).
If you’re not familiar with lexers and parsers, Lex and Yaccyacc are the ancestors of semantical and analytical parsing, created far back in the 70s, and later adapted under GNU to Flex and Bison. Mostly these tools take some parsing rules as input, respectively at character and grammar level, and transform them into C code. I used them in the past to parse documents (in 1998, specifically, to automatically create work requests from SITATEX messages, while working at SITA/Equant).
After a bit of experimentation, and the realization that these lexers and parsers would largely be inconvenient to generate Go code, I turned to reddit r/golang, where I eventually discovered ANTLR4.
ANTLR4 is something similar to lex/yacc, and has been developed during the last 25 years, and can generate code in most popular languages, including Go. Version 4 even offers the strong benefit of allowing developers to separate the grammar from the code, which lex and yacc didn’t allow. So, I ended buying the Bible of ANTLR, The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference, and started reading it.
This week will likely be dedicated to experimenting with ANTLR4, continue looking for jobs, and… taking care of tax chore, AKA “the main downside of being a freelancer”.
Talk to you next week, and in the meantime, enjoy your taxes too ;)
AI generated wordobulator machine