Re: Syntax trees from strings

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Søren Hauberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Jun 28, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Juan Pablo Carbajal <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Søren Hauberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Hi All
>>>
>>> I just had a very interesting chat with a researcher doing machine learning 
>>> in collaboration with Coursera, trying to build large scale grading 
>>> systems. They are working on tools for grading the quality of a code 
>>> submission by students (i.e. a student submit a piece of code as an answer 
>>> to an exercise, and now they want to grade that piece of code).
>>>
>>> As they use Octave as their main teaching language they also hook into the 
>>> Octave code to build these grading systems. In particular they use the 
>>> Octave parser to generate syntax trees. Right now they get the code 
>>> submission through a database, then they write the code to a file and run 
>>> the parser on that file. He was curious if there are ways of to avoid 
>>> writing the code to a file in order to parse it. Do we have such functions?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Søren
>>>
>>
>> That's kind of cool. Is their development available for the community?
>> Are they releasing this upgrades/extensions under GPLv3 or compatible?
>
> As it is now this is purely research (i.e. not production code), which I 
> doubt they will release. I don't know if they will release code once they 
> have something for production.
>
> I do doubt that such would be of value to others as it is bound to be very 
> specialised to their particular infrastructure, but I don't know.
>
> Søren
>

Generating parse trees from code would be very useful for automated
code generation as well...and research in general of course.
I would like to know what is their stand in relation to releasing
their developments back to the community. In Octconf the speaker from
Coursera politely avoided my question in this regard.