Re: Recursive Descent Parser

>Hmm... I am wrtting a shading language compiler for Renderman.... I
>have been having some problems with the language and putting various
>work arounds in to fix problems with yacc.... If the language is small
>enough and I am comfortable with recursive routines, should I try the
>recursive decent approach first?
>
>Mike Larson


Give it a go.


Recursive descent parsers aren't difficult to write for small 'proper'
LL1 languages.
One of our tutors at university believed than Lex and Yacc were evil
(seriously) and had us writing parsers for a language called Newt
within 4 weeks. Newt was a Pascal sub-set with only an integer
datatype (to stop us freshmen from throwing ourselves off the nearest
roof when coming to write the symbol table routines).


Looking back, it was a fantastic choice and I think that more
university lecturers should follow Chris' example.


Mind you, stepwise refinement via recursive descent is only really
'nice' when you can use nested procedures/functions ala Pascal.


And I agree with Stroustrup (which is nice :-) ), if you're writing a
langauge as an exeriment - hand writing the parser is the only way to
go.


Paul.

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