Re: C++ intermediate representation.

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


I suspect you are relating unrelated aspect of Stroustrup's work, and
hence drawing wrong conclusions to which to be surprised about! :)


>[I think the problem is that yacc tells you there's a bunch of
>shift/reduce conflicts and then produces a parser anyway for a
>language not entirely different from the one in your grammar. Half
>the time the shift resolution is what you want, half the time it's
>not, but unless you understand LR parsing fairly well, it's hard to
>look at the yacc output file and figure out what the problem was and
>what it did. So it's tempting to hope that it's close enough and
>blunder on ahead. -John]


Perhaps. But as in my above remark, I doubt that's what happened
in Stroustrup's compiler.
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