[ts-gen] attribute grammar vs. flex/bison [Was: FX bid/ask quotes truncated]

[Ken Feng]

Hi Bill,

Thank you for that detailed explanation: it's evident that you spent
much careful thought into the parser tools before making your choice.
I almost used Antlr once, a while back, for similar purposes.

I can understand your pain wrt MySQL - I personally feel it's a
terrificly efficient multi-platform RDBMS for most purposes (I also
like Postgresql), but my guess is, most users just want to "get it
working" wrt the Shim.  I appreciate the stuff you've done in MySQL
though - it's basically a big waste of time to manually set up
security masters, etc... ...and you've managed to have an arrangement
for querying that through IB - very nice.

I was mostly curious about the grammar for documentation purposes -
it's usually easy to see/understand the language specification through
a flex/bison file.  I know I am using only a very small fraction of
the shim's functionality, because I can't find/see the language spec
in one place (maybe it is somewhere - if so, do let me know!).

Luckily, this ignorance can be offset by the various examples in the
exs directory.

- K