Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rlgvax!hadron!jsdy
From: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Null source transformer for C
Message-ID: <613@hadron.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Nov-86 23:40:56 EST
Article-I.D.: hadron.613
Posted: Wed Nov 12 23:40:56 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Nov-86 04:00:22 EST
References: <5058@brl-smoke.ARPA> <1105@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Organization: Hadron, Inc., Fairfax, VA
Lines: 26
Summary: An alternative way (for diffs)

In article <1105@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> jon@cit-vax.UUCP (Jon Leech) writes:
>In article <5058@brl-smoke.ARPA> jrv@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (James R. Van Zandt) writes:
>>Several times I've wanted to make a change to some C source code that
>>would be minor, but requires parsing it.  Some examples are:
>	Another example that I badly needed recently is a 'diff'-like program
>driven by syntax rather than text; I had two divergent versions of a large
>program with differing indentations, preprocessor usage, etc. ...

What I did at one point, after a round of 'style wars' had badly
trashed some otherwise good pieces of code, was to write into the
'compare' program some language-specific routines that recognised
general C and assembler constructs (assuming file.[csh] was right),
and transformed the files such that:
  all white space became a single space (trailing WS stripped);
  all '{'s and '}'s put on single lines, indented or not
  semicolons not in strings or comments introduced new lines
  no blank lines.
Terrible format to read, but a common, comparable format.  It got
the job done, and was lots easier to write than a general parser.
Unfortunately, it's on an 800 bpi tape that I can't read right
now.  But, you should be able to do this at home with some simple
equipment [;-)].  Just remember to match "" '' /**/.
-- 

	Joe Yao		hadron!jsdy@seismo.{CSS.GOV,ARPA,UUCP}
			jsdy@hadron.COM (not yet domainised)