Re: parsing C and C++, Generating a simple hand-coded like

George,


> Note that I am in no way championing this style of compiler design,
> and I have never written a C or C++ compiler ... most of my work has
> been in scripting DSLs, Lisp and Pascal derivatives ... but, to date,
> I haven't encountered any language syntax ambiguities that I believed
> could not be resolved after parsing was complete.


If you are willing to accept multiple parse trees for the same
token sequence it is always possible to 'successfully' parse
a language.


I have a parser for C that does not use any symbol table. The most
common ambiguous parse is:


f(i); // function taking one argument, or perhaps
                // a declaration of i to have type f with redundant ()


I am currently working on a C++ parser. The main problem with
C++ is that there are a lot more constructs that lead to an
ambiguous parse.


I know of at least one other tool vendor who fully parses C/C++ source
using syntax information only, before building a symbol table.

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