Larry has requested privately that I send the counter proposal PEP and additional information, so here it is:

I've send the PEP draft to Nick. The patch that I uploaded contains
DSL examples, an ml-yacc grammar and token specifications.

Two prototype tools are available. Usage:

   ./printsemant Tools/preprocess/testcases/posix_stat.c

   ./preprocess Tools/preprocess/testcases/posix_stat.c 


The first tool dumps the semantically checked parse tree to stdout,
the second tool dumps the preprocessed .c file to stdout.

These are *prototypes* written in Standard ML, since I'm not familiar
with the PLY toolchain.


Known deficiencies:

  * The Python 'test' expression is not semantically checked. The syntax
    however is checked since it is part of the grammar.

  * The lexer does not handle triple quoted strings.

  * C declarations are parsed in a primitive way. The final implementation
    should utilize 'declarator' and 'init-declarator' from the C grammar.

  * The *preprocess* tool does not emit code for the left-and-right optional
    arguments case (addch.c). The *printsemant* tool can deal with this case.

  * Since the *preprocess* tool generates the output from the parse
    tree, the original indentation of the define block is lost.