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<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
<a name="metaparse.the_design_of_the_library"></a><a class="link" href="the_design_of_the_library.html" title="The design of the library">The design of the
library</a>
</h2></div></div></div>
<div class="toc"><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="section"><a href="the_design_of_the_library.html#metaparse.the_design_of_the_library.design_rationale">Design
rationale</a></span></dt></dl></div>
<p>
The purpose of the library is to provide tools to build template metaprograms
being able to interpret the content of a string literal and generate code,
display error messages, etc based on the content of the string literal. Such
metaprograms are called <a class="link" href="reference.html#parser">parser</a>s. Metaparse is
based on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parser_combinator" target="_top">parser
combinators</a>.
</p>
<p>
The key components of the library:
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; ">
<li class="listitem">
<a class="link" href="reference.html#ref-string">Compile-time string representation</a>. These
are tools for representing the content of a string literal in a way that
makes it possible for template metaprograms to work on them. For this the
library provides the <a class="link" href="reference.html#string"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">string</span></code></a>
template class, which is a drop-in replacement of Boost.MPL's <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">string</span></code> implementation, and the <a class="link" href="reference.html#BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING</span></code></a>
macro.
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<a class="link" href="reference.html#parsers">Parsers</a>. These are template metafunction
classes parsing a prefix of a string literal. These are simple <a class="link" href="reference.html#parser">parser</a>s
providing the basic building blocks for more complicated ones doing some
useful work.
</li>
<li class="listitem">
<a class="link" href="reference.html#combinators">Parser combinators</a>. These are <a class="link" href="reference.html#metafunction">template metafunction</a>s taking <a class="link" href="reference.html#parser">parser</a>s
as argument and/or returning <a class="link" href="reference.html#parser">parser</a>s as their
result. They can be used to build more and more complex <a class="link" href="reference.html#parser">parser</a>s
out of the simple ones.
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">
<a name="metaparse.the_design_of_the_library.design_rationale"></a><a class="link" href="the_design_of_the_library.html#metaparse.the_design_of_the_library.design_rationale" title="Design rationale">Design
rationale</a>
</h3></div></div></div>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem">
<span class="bold"><strong>Why template metaprogramming?</strong></span>
</li></ul></div>
<p>
An alternative is using <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">constexpr</span></code>
functions instead of template metaprograms. There are certain things that
are difficult (if possible) using <code class="computeroutput"><span class="keyword">constexpr</span></code>
functions: building containers (at compile-time) the length of which depend
on the parsed text (eg. parsing a JSON list), generating and validating types
(eg. <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">printf</span></code>).
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem">
<span class="bold"><strong>Why are there so many folding parsers?</strong></span>
</li></ul></div>
<p>
Compilation speed and memory consumption is a critical part of template metaprogramming-based
libraries. Users of the library interfaces built with Metaparse will have
to pay for that every time they compile their code. Therefore it is important
to provide the parser authors the ability to use the parser combinators with
minimal overhead, while it is also important to provide convenient combinators
for beginners and for the cases where that is the best option anyway.
</p>
<p>
<a class="link" href="reference.html#repeated"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">repeated</span></code></a>
combined with <a class="link" href="reference.html#sequence"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">sequence</span></code></a>,
<a class="link" href="reference.html#accept_when"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">accept_when</span></code></a>
and <a class="link" href="reference.html#transform"><code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">transform</span></code></a>
can replace any of the folding parsers, however, for the cost of constructing
intermediate containers, that are (usually) processed sequentially after
that.
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem">
<span class="bold"><strong>Why external code generator for <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING</span></code>?</strong></span>
</li></ul></div>
<p>
To be able to support longer strings. It generates code using macros to reduce
the size of the header files (the reducion is multiples of MBs).
</p>
<div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem">
<span class="bold"><strong>Why defining a custom version of Boost.Preprocessor
macros?</strong></span>
</li></ul></div>
<p>
There are two reasons for the library defining its own set of preprocessor
metaprogramming macros: to have control over the upper limit of iteration
steps and to be able to clean the macros up once they have done their job
(and avoid polluting the macros of the users).
</p>
<p>
Note that these macros live in the <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">impl</span></code>
directory, which means that they are an implementation detail of the library
and should be used internally only.
</p>
</div>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2015 Abel Sinkovics<p>
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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