tokay VS microperl-standalone

[0]: https://github.com/tokay-lang/tokay

Tokay Programming Language\ (21 comments)

I am very interested in this project as a "better awk" is something I have often fantasized about.

I read all of the documentation that's available on https://tokay.dev/tokay-docs/, but unfortunately it never really... describes itself? Many sections, including the section on "parselets" are just unwritten. "Consumable" values are mentioned but never described (there is a "stub" section that doesn't really explain what the term means).

It begins with a pretty detailed description of value "severity" but doesn't really motivate why the concept exists. (I think that it's (basically) a way to very concisely discard certain matches? When there are "more important" matches around them?)

There are no examples of how I could use Tokay to "parse" something -- there are lots of examples dotted through the docs, but none of them demonstrate working with structured file formats, and they feel a little bit contrived.

I'm not complaining here: this project is not making any false claims about its status, the docs are clearly and explicitly unfinished, it is very clear that Tokay is still under active development.

But I want to learn more about it! I came away from that with a sense that, this has the potential to be really useful to me, but without any concrete evidence to support that. I guess the next step is to download the source and start reading through the tests.

All this to say: please highlight some examples showcasing situations where Tokay shines! (Parsing CSVs containing quoted strings was making the rounds recently, right? What does that look like in Tokay?)

Oh, actually, the GitHub readme has an example that is more involved than any in the documentation: https://github.com/tokay-lang/tokay

    _ : [ \t]+                # redefine whitespace to just tab and space

I like how Awk is just a single executable. A single-executable Perl that includes only the core library would be great. There is Microperl [0, 1], but no idea how well it compiles with more up-to-date Perl versions.

0: https://github.com/bentxt/microperl-standalone

1: Original article from 2000 by the author Simon Cozens: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html