Re: Maintaining scope while parsing C with a YACC grammar

eliben <eliben@gmail.com> writes:


> [There's a couple of possibilities. One is to add separate rules for
> the open and close braces with action code that increments and
> decrements the nesting level, so you know when you reduce the
> declaration what scope it is in. Another is to parse the whole thing
> into an AST without trying to interpret the symbols other than making
> pointers to a generic symbol table entry per name, then walk the AST
> and add the scope and type info. Perhaps people will have other
> suggestions. -John]


I strongly recommend the "build a tree" solution. It might seem like
a lot of trouble at first, but it will simplify things in the long
run.


Do all the interesting work during a subsequent walk of the tree. Or
multiple walks.


I'd do the "making pointers to a generic symbol table..." part during
the tree walk, too, except that C requires some sort of kludgery to
deal with typedefs.


- Bob
[The point of the generic symbol table stuff is that you have to remember the
names somehow, and that seems less awful than doing a strdup() for each
name and hanging the strings off the AST. -John]

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.