Re: C++ intermediate representation.

Chris F Clark <cfc@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:


[...]


| The one thing that surprises me, given Stroustrup's statement about
| building C++ with a yacc parser is how he made some of the design
| mistakes he did. The syntax that uses parenthesis for passing
| constructor arguments in a declaration, so that one cannot easily
| distinguish a declaration of a variable that has constructor arguments
| from a function prototype declaration is an example. That should have
| caused his tool to give him conflicts, indicating that he was
| wandering into an ambiguous grammar and should have found a different
| syntax. Problems like this are why I try to steer people away from
| hand-written recursive descent--one can easily write a parser that has
| inconsistent rules by hand, expecially when one is prototyping and
| adding extensions. The fact that Stroustrup was able to make the same
| mistakes with a tool worries me extremely.


My understanding is that at the time he introduced the
"functional-cast" syntax, all C compilers in production use were
broken in that respect -- meaning, they were unable to parse things
like "int(a)", since Johnson's PCC compiler. Therefore, I believe he
thought that the C definition would eventually be "aligned" to match
practice, e.g. "int(a)" would not be considered a declaration.
Consequently, he made it an expression. "Unfortunately", a few months
later, someone presented a parser capable of parsing "int(a)" as
originally described in K&R. And the C definition never changed in
that respect. Hence the conflict.


As a matter of fact, it is not that he was unaware of the issue (I've
heard that he started "breaking" any C parser in existence at the time
before properly embarking on C with Classes), it was a kind of
"antipicatory" decision. I believe D&E has some paragraphs on that.


--
                                                                                                              Gabriel Dos Reis
                                                                                      gdr@integrable-solutions.net

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