Re: Newbie parsing a simple bespoke language questions

> [My advice is invariably to have the parser accept a larger language
> and do the type checking in your semantic code. That lets you
> produce useful error messages like "foo command requires two
> integers" rather than a generic syntax error. -John]


Humm... With %error-verbose you easily get "got integer expected
float" type messages but that is about the limit I guess without
jumping through too many hoops. Thanks. I have chosen the generic
parse + semantic check route now.


I need to parse fixed point numbers as well as integers. Is it better
to do things like this in the scanner & return a FP token + value or
make some rules and parse as 2 ints & '.'? (my scanner dumps all
whitespace between tokens at the moment so "123 . 456" is legal... but
I can fix that...) Is one way good/bad form?


Also is it bad form to use hints from the parser state to decipher
tokens (I have seen some webpages describing how to do this) -
e.g. for flag lookup "/f", change lookup from identifier string table
to flag string table to tokenise f after a '/'?


Chris
[Scanning floats can be surprisingly ugly, particularly if you allow
Fortran style 12.3E+4 exponents. I'd do it in the lexer. -John]

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