Re: Algol 68

Chris Moss <harvard!seismo!mcvax!doc.ic.ac.uk!cdsm>
26 Aug 87 12:21:27 GMT

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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 26 Aug 87 12:21:27 GMT
References: <646@ima.ISC.COM> <648@ima.ISC.COM> <675@ima.ISC.COM>
From: Chris Moss <harvard!seismo!mcvax!doc.ic.ac.uk!cdsm>
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.

In article <675@ima.ISC.COM> harvard!rutgers!petsd!cjh writes:
>Can someone propose an alternative to attribute grammars, as a
>way to specify context-sensitive syntax in a form suitable
>for machine processing? I would be interested to know. The
>answer doesn't have to solve the *whole* problem of compilation;
>if you can bite off a substantial chunk, that's worth while.


Definite Clause Grammars, or Metamorphosis Grammars to use an earlier
title, do pretty well. They are just a wrapped up form of Prolog (i.e. they
have full unification). Before you say that's even worse than AGs,
I've been comparing YACC/Modula runtimes with compiled Prolog times for a
small compiler recently and they aren't too different. (I'm not making any
claims about space! :-).
For details see my thesis (I.C. 1981) or paper in Lisp&FunPL Conf 1982.
Chris Moss.
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