In the previous two installments of this article series (The Magical Power of Attributes in Spirit – Primitives and The Magical Power of Attributes in Spirit – Operators) we talked about the attribute handling in different constructs utilized to build parsers and generators with Spirit. We will continue this walkthrough while touching on the remaining parts: directives and non-terminals
Each operator implements its own set of attribute propagation rules. These rules define the synthesized attributes of Qi expressions and the consumed attributes of Karma expressions. As we have seen already, it is very important to understand how the synthesized and consumed attributes are formed. Parsers and generators are most elegant and efficient if they are tightly integrated with your data structures, and learning to match those to the attributes is crucial to being able to apply Spirit for your own needs.
Spirit V2.1 has been released only a couple of weeks ago. The first feedback we have gotten so far was overwhelming! Many people seem to quickly understand the concepts of the new library, being able to apply its power to their needs. We try to follow people’s comments and watch for reported problems. There is one theme recurring over and over again: attributes. This new (for Spirit) concept turns out to be the most difficult idea to understand, especially for somebody starting to work with the library.
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