rx VS kbnf

I had a similar kind of idea for a long time, which I put into action a few weeks ago via a standalone transpiler of Emacs' rx macro to common regexp syntaxes.[0] I ended up getting interrupted and didn't completely finish it, but it generally works, though is probably riddled with edge cases.

The basic idea of rx is to use S-expressions to describe regular expressions, and my elevator pitch would've been to embed rx invocations in shell scripts using $(syntax), the main use case being something like sed invocations.

I still think it's a neat idea, and complex regular expressions tend to be hard to parse for humans.

[0]: https://github.com/sulami/rx

The fundamental problem comes from assigning meaning to whitespace (in this case, concatenation). I had the same issues when developing KBNF ( https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf/blob/master/kbnf.md ) which operates in a closely related space.

In early development, I took a number of cues from regex that turned out to be bad ideas, in particular using whitespace for concatenation (which all BNF dialects seem to do).

Switching to '&' for concatenation fixed it and made things a lot clearer, as it would also do for Pomsky:

    'Hello' & ' '+ & ('world' | 'pomsky')

Hi everyone! Merry Christmas and happy new year!

I'm making a modernized BNF-style metalanguage that supports grammars for text and binary formats, but unless there's some kind of outside review, I won't find any blind spots I have until long after release.

If you have experience in grammars or protocols (text or binary), could you take a quick look?

Note: I'm not aiming for perfect expressivity; just 80-90% of use cases without making things overcomplicated so that it can be used descriptively in documentation.

https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf/blob/master/kbnf.md

Boredom is what led to pretty much every project I've ever done. I usually have a list in my head of things that could be made better, but they never come to anything until I have a lengthy period of nothing to do.

Latest example: I had to take all my vacation time this year or else I'd lose it. I got so bored that I built this over the past weeks: https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf