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From: Hannu Hartikainen <hannu.hartikainen@gmail.com>
To: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Early preview of s-expression based query parser
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 17:00:23 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <60f190f8.1c69fb81.7e7d2.40d1@mx.google.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20210714000239.804384-1-david@tethera.net>

On Tue, 13 Jul 2021 21:02:28 -0300, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> Feedback of any kind is welcome, but particularly on UI / UX
> issues. You can get a pretty good idea of the supported syntax by
> looking at the tests.

I read through the commits and it looks good to me implementation-wise.

I'm probably not the most experienced lisper around so take my ideas
with a grain of salt. I did work professionally on a Clojure codebase
for a couple of years and I've written a bunch of small programs in
Racket but that's pretty much it.

But looking at the sexp parser and the implementation of logical
connectors I can't help but think that isn't this patchset implementing
a tiny subset of a lisp? And wouldn't a full embedded lisp be much, much
more powerful?

I'd at least consider embedding something like s7 [0] or Janet [1],
writing bindings for enough Xapian functionality, and then writing the
rest in the lisp itself. That way you'd get a more powerful and
extensible sexp implementation, and you'd implement most of it in a much
more ergonomic language.

Of course I don't really know Xapian and I'm not sure of the design
goals of this sexp parser, but my experience with HoneySQL [2] tells me
that building queries with a lisp from lisp data structures can be
unbelievably powerful.

Hannu

[0]: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/s7.html
[1]: https://janet-lang.org/
[2]: https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-07-30  2:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-07-14  0:02 Early preview of s-expression based query parser David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 01/11] configure: optional library sfsexp David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 02/11] lib: split notmuch_query_create David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 03/11] lib: define notmuch_query_create_sexpr David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 04/11] CLI/search+address: support sexpr queries David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 05/11] lib/parse-sexp: parse 'and', 'not', 'or' David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 06/11] lib/parse-sexp: parse 'subject' David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 07/11] lib/parse-sexp: split terms in phrase mode David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 08/11] lib/parse-sexp: handle most fields David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 09/11] lib/parse-sexp: add error handling to internal API David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 10/11] lib/parse-sexp: add keyword arguments for fields David Bremner
2021-07-14  0:02 ` [PATCH 11/11] lib/parse-sexp: initial support for wildcard queries David Bremner
2021-07-16 14:00 ` Hannu Hartikainen [this message]
2021-07-18 19:43   ` Early preview of s-expression based query parser David Bremner

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