How explicit do I need to be when specifying were whitespace is or is not allowed? For instance would these rules:
rule lambda
'lambda' ( '(' params ')' )? block
end
rule params
# ...
end
rule block
'{' # ... '}'
end
be sufficient to match
lambda {
}
Basically do I need to specify everywhere optional whitespace may appear?
Yes, you do. In these rules you need to skip whitespace, but, for instance, when you parse strings, which may contain whitespace, you would like to retain them; that's why you have to specify.
However, before applying treetop to your string, you may try to run a "quick and dirty" regexp-based algorithm that discards whitespace from the places where they're optional. Still, this may be much harder that specifying whitespaces in your grammar.
