Re: Is the dangling else a syntax bug?

ralph@inputplus.demon.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy) schreibt:


>Also, separators are a pain if appending a new item to the list means
>an easily forgotton separator needs to be added.


This can cause problems only in position dependent lists, like array
indices or subroutine arguments, where the list items reside near to
each other. Otherwise it should do no harm to add separators wherever
you like, the possibly resulting empty list entries can be ignored by
the parser/compiler.


Even in C you have statement (expression?) separators, which are distinct from
statement terminators, and allow to write down multiple statements as a
syntactically single statement: stmt1, stmt2, stmt3;
I sometimes used that option to bypass the otherwise required block delimiters
"{...}".


>>[It's a religious argument. Separators are more mathematically elegant,
but terminators match people's expectations better. -John]<<


I suspect that it's more than that, but I have no arguments due to my lack of
theory and practice in grammars :-(


DoDi
[The C comma operator separates expressions, not statements. -John]

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