The last couple weeks have involved a lot of work with lex and yacc, which are two profoundly useful programming tools that are almost as old as I am. I've done a lot of work to re-vamp vtkParse.l and vtkParse.y so that they can parse much more of the C++ grammar, in fact they are able to parse each and every VTK class header file without any need to use //BTX, //ETX to block out the more complex bits. The new parser can do the following:

1. Parse all operator methods and return them as e.g. operator->
2. Return names for all types e.g. someclass<double>sometype
3. Parse multiple classes per file, and store info for the one that matches the filename
4. Parse templates, typedefs, enums, scoped names, simple math expressions, etc.

However, the most important feature is perhaps that it can parse complex instances of C++ grammar without choking… this has always been a major problem with the old VTK wrapper generators. There are still many features that I want to add, and I need to expand the FileInfo/FunctionInfo data structs that vtkParse uses so that it can store enum, template, and typedef information.

The parser can be found in my VTK on github and in WrapVTK.