Re: Generating a simple hand-coded like recursive descent parser

Robert A Duff wrote:


> The typical solution in Ada compilers is for the parser to build a
> tree that means "this could be any of ...", with X and Y as subtrees,
> and then semantic analysis has symbol tables, so it knows what X is,
> and changes that node into a "function call" or "array indexing" or
> whatever is appropriate. (Note: X could be an overloaded name.)
>
> My question is: can that technique work for the above C and C++
> ambiguities?


What benefits you would like with this technique?


> Does it make the problem easier or harder? Is the answer different
> for C++ than for C?


Well, in C it's just not a great problem to determine whether current
identifier is a typedef name, so it's hard to me to see what we would have
from passing that choice to a late phase. That approach would be reasonable
for some precompiling techniques like precompiled headers, but there are
other issues with the preprocessing phase in both C and C++.


In C++, there are too many disambiguation variants possible to track them
all into representation trees.

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