Nearly at Dogfooding state

This post was accidentally promoted to this month on this day, edited the post through the blogger's dashboard and for some reason, it got promoted to today.

Well when I started this journey, I didn't have the slightest clue about what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing but I at least have an idea of what I want to be doing.

Over the past eight years I've been developing the parser for OILexer to parse grammar files, and it's got its fair share of oddities lying around: production rules and tokens refer to 'flag' items in different ways, tokens say it's a flag via 'IsFlag=true;', the other just uses a bang character (!).

The risk of developing show stopping infinite loops is a real concern when you're developing an interactive parser that's more often in a bad parse state than it is in a proper parse state.

Now OILexer's capable of reproducing this parser (in a much more regular and consistent way) that appears to operate at a factor of 60-80 times quicker.

Granted this is preliminary and I'm still implementing the error recovery, but things look quite promising.