Re: Flex/Bison/ANTLR question... alternative tools for translation?

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, rgaupsas wrote:


> I'm working on a translator whereby the input grammar is poorly
> defined; a lot is contextually dependent.


Is there a reason why you can't change it?


> I've gotten pretty far with
> Flex/Bison, [...]
>
> WK COLOR COLOR ... COLOR NAME PARAM = NUMBER
>
> The problem is that syntactically NAME and PARAM are indistinguishable
> from COLOR (both are alpha numeric of the same form), so the following
> form will not work (note Bflag sets the start_state in Flex).


I don't understand this. Since you're using uppercase, I would expect
that `COLOR', `NAME', and `PARAMETER' would be terminal symbols in the
rules of your GNU Bison grammar, so that they could not be said to be
alphanumeric. The same would apply if they were non-terminal symbols.
If "COLOR", "NAME", and "PARAMETER" are keywords in your grammar, I
would expect your scanning function (`yylex()') to look them up in a
table and return the appropriate token to `yyparse()'.


> Any way to better handle this with Flex/Bison?


I suggest you post (or "cc") any further questions to the
Flex and/or GNU Bison mailing lists:
help-flex@gnu.org
help-bison@gnu.org


> Any other recommended tools or methods for building a translator for
> a poorly structured language.


I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to write such a
tool.


Laurence Finston
http://www.gnu.org/software/3dldf/LDF.html

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