Correct[0]. This was also my first thought after reading
> Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed. It doesn’t expose a stable API for its parser either. In fact, quite uniquely, in its implementation it doesn’t even build a parse tree at all9! The only reasonable approach left in my opinion is to carefully extract the relevant parts of SQLite’s source code and adapt it to build the parser I wanted
Did they made a proper problem research in the first place?
I was also baffled. "No formal specification"? Two minutes of browsing is enough to find it: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y
I'm very well aware of parse.y, if you look into the syntaqlite code, you'd find it's a critical part of how the whole "source extraction" mentioned in the article works [1]
To be clear when I say "formal specification", I'm not just talking about the formal grammar rules but also how those interpreted in practice. Something closer to the ECMAScript specification (https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...).
[1] https://github.com/LalitMaganti/syntaqlite/blob/93638c68f9a0...