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<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h4 class="title">
<a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start"></a><a class="link" href="quick_start.html" title="Quick Start">Quick Start</a>
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<a name="spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_"></a><h6>
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<a class="link" href="quick_start.html#spirit.qi.tutorials.quick_start.why_would_you_want_to_use_spirit_qi_">Why
would you want to use Spirit.Qi?</a>
</h6>
<p>
Spirit.Qi is designed to be a practical parsing tool. The ability to generate
a fully-working parser from a formal EBNF specification inlined in C++
significantly reduces development time. Programmers typically approach
parsing using ad hoc hacks with primitive tools such as scanf. Even regular-expression
libraries (such as boost regex) or scanners (such as Boost tokenizer) do
not scale well when we need to write more elaborate parsers. Attempting
to write even a moderately-complex parser using these tools leads to code
that is hard to understand and maintain.
</p>
<p>
One prime objective is to make the tool easy to use. When one thinks of
a parser generator, the usual reaction is "it must be big and complex
with a steep learning curve." Not so. Spirit is designed to be fully
scalable. The library is structured in layers. This permits learning on
an as-needed basis, after only learning the minimal core and basic concepts.
</p>
<p>
For development simplicity and ease in deployment, the entire library consists
of only header files, with no libraries to link against or build. Just
put the Spirit distribution in your include path, compile and run. Code
size? -very tight -essentially comparable to hand written recursive descent
code.
</p>
<p>
Our tutorials will walk you through the simplest Spirit examples, incrementally
building on top of the earlier examples as we expose more and more features
and techniques. We will try to be as gentle as possible with the learning
curve. We will present the tutorials in a cookbook style approach. This
style of presentation is based on our BoostCon '07 and BoostCon '08 slides.
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Have fun!
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2001-2010 Joel de Guzman, Hartmut Kaiser<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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