Re: simple vs complex languages

Steve_Lipscombe@amat.com wrote:
> Robert wrote
>
>
>>The thing that bothers me about all this fancy parsing technology we
>>have developed over the past few decades is that it is solving an
>>artificial problem. If we didn't design our programming languages to
>>have such doggone complicated syntax, then we would be happy to use
>>hand-written recursive-descent parsers.
>>...


Actually I think that newer programming languages are (mostly) pretty
easy to parse. If its LR(1) (and admittedly some languages are not)
then its pretty easy to parse.


One school of thought is that we first developed syntaxically
complicated languages because we didn't know any better. Then we
developed some good language, theory, understood what we were doing,
and began developing syntaxically much simpler languages.


A different school of thought is that once we developed good ways of
handling simpler syntax we abandoned complicated syntax in favour of
syntax we knew how to handle well.


Assuming the latter is true (and, for the most part, I don't) what are
some examples of programming syntax that we would like to use but
which is viewed as too much trouble to parse?




Ralph Boland

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