Re: Compiler Compiler Compiler

Mike Dimmick <mike@dimmick.demon.co.uk> wrote:
|Many 'new' programming languages tend to be C or C++ derivatives.
|There are a number of problems with the C and C++ syntaxes which can
|only be solved by absorbing semantic information into the parser.
|Unfortunately, this usually means that information must be entered
|into semantic tables whilst processing a complete rule. YACC really
|doesn't handle this at all well.


I've never tried to parse C/C++. Could you give an example or two
of the problems (or point me to a reference).


The problems I have seen with some parsing strategies is having the
lexer bind a symbol before it gets to the parser, that is trying
to lookup in the symbol tables and resolving whether a token is a
varible/type/unbound before it hits the parser.


Cheers,
Kevin
[With C, the messiest place is parsing typedefs, exactly because of
the symbol binding issue. Typedefs act like keywords except
sometimes. C++ is much worse, the syntax is ambiguous as was
discussed here recently. -John]

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.