Legacy:UnDox Revisited

some discussion from Dma:

Dma: I might be a bit bold for saying this, but we REALLY should make our own UnDox with some of the code from Wookee. UnDox has more errors than I can count. We can make one that has the option of directly reading from the TextBuffer objects that are part of most .U files (or allow the user to use .UC files). Perl should work for this. I for one am sick of centered UnrealScript source code!

Mychaeel: Sounds good to me. Wookee is Perl though, and even though I think Perl would be best suited for a task like this, a tool like this will gain much more attention if it doesn't require users to install Perl on their computers first. So I think using Delphi or C++ would be a better choice, if only for that. Supporting .u files sounds good; we could either use Antonio Cordero's Delphi unit or UnrVarpu, provided we don't feel like reinventing a wheel. (By the way, I hear that UnDox's creator was employed by Epic later thanks to him creating UnDox...)

Tarquin: Was Dma's suggestion maybe that Undox2 could output Wiki markup, ready to become Wiki pages that can then be annotated?

Mychaeel: No, I think he's talking about something like UnDox implemented in Perl. (I must admit that I had accidentally skipped over dma's mention of Perl in his statement when I wrote my answer – that's why I'm so needlessly expressly pointing out that Wookee is Perl...)

Bcladd: Okay, is there a published source for the grammar for UnrealScript? I am particularly interested in UT2003. I am inherently a tool builder and I would like to play at manipulating .uc files. If I have to I can start trying to extract the grammar from the wonderful UnrealScrip reference here but that seems like real work. The grammar would make it possible to use some thing like Perl's Parse::RecDescent or LLg or even bison (I can get my head around recursive descent parsers much better than I can shift-reduce, but with a parser generator all that stuff can be automated).

The grammar could be applied to making an open-source documentation generator UnDox, a Class_Wikifier, or even a preprocessor-based profiler (intrusive profiling). Just thinking out loud. Still trying to finish an entire Mutator so I am new at UnrealScript; I know a thing or two about programming languages, however.

Tarquin: not as far as I know. but it's the sort of thing that could be worked on here – start a page on UnrealScript Grammar or something :)

El Muerte TDS: hmm... intresting, defining the grammar would be very usefull. I wonder if Epic has a grammar specification, that would make it much easier.

Related Topics

• Other applications