Domain Specific Languages

Chapter 17. Delimiter-Directed Translation

Translate source text by breaking it up into chunks (usually lines) and then parsing each chunk.

17.1 How It Works

Delimiter-Directed Translation works by taking the input and breaking it down into smaller chunks based on some kind of delimiter character. You can use any delimiter characters you like, but the most common first delimiter is the line ending, so I’ll use that for my discussion.

Breaking up the script into lines is usually pretty simple, as most programming environments have library functions that will read an input stream a line at a time. One complication you may run into is if you have ...