Re: perfect hashing

"Tzvetan Mikov" <ceco@jupiter.com> wrote in message
> I guess that would be faster, but it seems "cleaner" not to mix the
> reserved words and the symbol table together. Going down this road in
> a C compiler we could even use the same symbol table for preprocessor
> defines as well ( has that been done?). Is that a good idea?


Yes. As I wrote in http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/96-10-103:


> Is scanning/parsing _speed_ ever reason to go toward using a hash
> table for identifying keywords?


Sure. In C like languages, really fast compilation may require an
integrated preprocessor, and since even keywords can be #define'd to
something else, it would be wrong to specifically scan for them as such.
Therefore, the best approach is often to recognise an identifier
([A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*), then lookup (perhaps via hash table) several
properties of the identifier:
* is it a macro name? (and perhaps its macro definition)
* is it a keyword? (and its keyword token)
* other useful attributes of the id (id known to be, or definitely not be,
a type name, class name, member name, etc.)


Jan Gray
Redmond, WA

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