Elzed FAQ

Looking back over the last few years, I'm averaging a release every 8 months or so, not counting point releases for critical bug fixes (which, I hasten to add, are rare.)   back to top
 

Very early in development (in the previous century, in fact), I was calling the product "Language Z", which I shortened to "LZ", which became "Elzed".   back to top
 

Strictly speaking, Elzed is both an expression parser and evaluator. Elzed uses a hand-built, bottom-up operator precedence parser based on a heavily revised and extended form of Dijkstra's Shunting Yard algorithm. Some of the major revisions are support for variable parameter lists, multi-line expressions, bi-directional associativity, strings, and parentheses.   back to top
 

No. Maintaining these is a big pain, and pain is something I try to avoid at all costs. Since I keep the docs on the web site right up to date, you can always be sure that the latest information is available here.    back to top
 

Elzed isn't open source because I haven't figured out how to make an income with it that way. Now, I acknowledge that there are folks out there who have figured out how to do this, but they're big outfits offering products with broad appeal, not niche players like me. I'm competing not only with open source, but also with freeware, shareware, and other commercial parsers; the only ones making any money to speak of are the commercial players.   back to top
 

The short answer is there's no free license because I intend Elzed to be a money-making enterprise. The long answer is, of course, longer, but I can summarize it by saying that 1) most folks (me included) who use free licenses tend to keep using them in perpetuity, and 2) I couldn't come up with a reduced feature set that made a good showing of Elzed's capabilities, but wouldn't require constant tweaking as features were added. Besides, students should be writing their own parsers, anyway, right? I did.   back to top
 

Sorry, no--there isn't one.   back to top
 

Hmmm, yes--well, this is a source of some annoyance to me. Way back in the day, I uploaded Elzed version 1.0 to CNet's download service. After that, dozens (maybe hundreds) of web sites copied the upload. It's still available, even though the original CNet entry has been deleted, the product's original web site is long gone, and the product version itself has been obsolete for years.   back to top
 

Yes, I have! I'm fascinated by this--I've always thought of music as math you can dance to. You can check out their MySpace page here. And guys, if you ever make it to the States, please let me know. I'd really like to buy you all a beer.   back to top
 

Well, not completely--I'm just better at math than spelling. Yes, I know that sigma is pronounced "s", but it shur iz purty, no?   back to top
 

I don't offer one because most of my C++ customers prefer to write classes of their own that wrap only the API calls they need. Given that desire, providing an 'official' wrapper would almost certainly lead to aesthetic offenses--wrapper classes that, as their first act, instantiate my wrapper class. Ugly. Now, it's true that Elzed is written in C++, and it would be possible for me to expose some of the classes it's built from. In my experience, however, this creates more questions than answers--rather counterproductive for one (such as myself) who's in the answer business. Yes, a flat API is so 1970's--but it's also unambiguous and goes everywhere.   back to top