Tuesday 19th was our last vestry meeting with loads cool things happening. Some of you guys might remember the crane that was here a few weeks ago to check out the tower, well the pictures all came back and I’ve posted a few below.

One of the things to come out of our meeting this week was that we have created a new committee for managing the flow of information around the church. Members are your friendly neighbourhood rector’s church warden Trevor and of course yours truely. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at new ways to keep people informed so keep an eye on this blog. Of course any suggestions will be welcome, just post a comment!

The important issue is what will this new committee be called!! The “Ministry of Information” has been put forward as well as the “Bureau of Intelligence”, my personal favourite is the “Grand High Commission for Information Control”

Anyway, here are the photos, bcnyall!

G

The problem – our company provides software that looks up words in a selection of dictionaries. However we want to allow users to enter their own custom words in the dictionary and to have these returned in preference to any other dictionary. This is to be a web based tool and I have to provide UI, business logic and storage for the new words. Each word can have multiple definitions associated with it and each definition can have multiple associated words or inflections.

My plan is to use Mgrammer to define a language for the entry of new words, definitions, and inflections then translate that into actual database tables and associated logic within the Oslo repository. The work of creating and populating the database will hopefully be done for me by Oslo.

The solution!

If you are reading this blog I’m assuming that you have already installed the Oslo SDK and have read through some of the getting started docs. I’m using the intellipad provided with the Oslo SDK as this seems to be the best tool available.

As I’m just learning this myself I hope to present each step of the process in a series of short posts on this blog, in this first post I will write some grammer that allows the user to enter a series of words.

Here is some input I want to process:

NewWord:Hello; NewWord:World;

Each new word is prefixed with “NewWord:” and they are separated by a semi colon. There can be any amount of space or newline characters between each word.

Below is some M, I draw your attention to the main rule which is “syntax Main = (Word WordText WordSeparator)+;”

• Main, WordText and WordSeparator are all tokens that we define further down.
• the + means that we must have 1 or more occurances of the whole pattern in the brackets.

module Dictionary
{   
    language CustomDictionary
    {
        // Require one or more words separated by semicolon
        syntax Main = (Word WordText WordSeparator)+;
   
        // This token will be used to prefix a word declaration
        token Word = “NewWord:”;
       
        // This token will be used to separate words
        token WordSeparator = “;”;
       
        /* This token describes a valid word, we will allow
           upper and lower case letters as well as – and ‘
         */
        token WordText = (“a”..”z” | “A”..”Z” | “-” | “‘”)+;
       
        // Add an interleave rule to ignore whitespace between words
        syntax LF = “\u000A”;
        syntax CR = “\u000D”;
        syntax Space = “\u0020″;
        interleave Whitespace = LF | CR | Space;

    }
}

This will then translate our input into the following:

Main[
  [
    [
      "NewWord:",
      "Hello",
      ";"
    ],
    [
      "NewWord:",
      "World",
      ";"
    ]
  ]
]

Which hopefully when this project is finished can be used to populate a table in the Oslo Repository.

That’s it for now, in the next post I will expand the language to allow definitions to be added.

L8r

In particular I’m talking about the Windows Azure cloud platform and MS Oslo and the M language in particular. I personally believe that when these technologies reach their full potential there will be a bigger impact on the way we write software than when .Net was introduced several years ago. Hell, even now I know talented C and VB programmers  who are struggling to find work out there because they didn’t adopt .Net when it came out; this is going to be even bigger and I don’t fancy being in that boat in a couple of years time.

Anyhow, I’m going to kick off my blogging with an investigation into Oslo and M so watch this space if you’re interested

L8r