Re: Dragon Book - update necessary?

Randall Hyde <rhyde@cs.ucr.edu> wrote:


> LLkParsing@aol.com wrote on 10/13/00 10:23 AM:
>
> >> For undergraduate work the only complaint I've had with this book is
> >> that it's very wordy.
> >
> > Wordy is a charitable description of the book's readability. On the
> > other end of the scale is the also old, but still good "Crafting a
> > Compiler with C" by Fischer & LeBlanc. Dragon does make an excellent
> > reference though.
>
> "Crafting..." is a great book for those who want a step-by-step
> description of how to implement a recursive-descent compiler in C.
> However, the theoretical coverage is a little weak. It makes a great
> reference for someone writing (simple) compilers in HLLs; I'm not sure
> how good it would be in a classroom setting where you're teaching
> compiler theory rather than the mechanics of actually coding a
> compiler. Also, I suspect most schools are using Flex/Bison
> (Lex/Yacc) or something similar for student projects, so a book that
> teaches recursive descent parsing in C is probably of less use to such
> schools (personally, I prefer writing recursive descent parsers, but
> that's just my own personal belief system at work).


Bjarne Stroustrup once said on BIX (hmm .. are you *that* rhyde?) that
one of his biggest mistakes in cfront was in allowing the other Bell
Labs guys to convince him to use yacc and that he'd love to have the
funds to get an intern to redo it as recursive descent. The reason
was that recursive descent is more work upfront but you get good error
messages almost for free, while yacc is easy to get going but the work
required to get decent error messages was nearly unbounded.


This was some years ago now.


-- Bruce

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