Maintaining scope while parsing C with a Yacc grammar

I'm sorry I missed this discussion. I did see the comments by Ira
Baxter and Paul Mann though and found them very informative. The one
thing that it prompted me to add is that there results are not
contradictory.


Paul Mann's grammar additions allow one to describe scoping as a
S-attributed grammar problem--that's the class of calculations one can
perform in one pass as one parses with an LR grammar. This matches
the fact that many languages such as C & Pascal are defined to allow
their declarations to be processed in one pass with define before use
rules.


The system Ira Baxter described was a general attribute solving
system. Thus, it includes Paul's model, but being more general
requires more work to do so. The general system does allow parsing
languages like PL/I where the declaration can appear after some (or
all) of the uses.


Hope this helps,
-Chris


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Chris Clark email: christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com
Compiler Resources, Inc. Web Site: http://world.std.com/~compres
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Berlin, MA 01503 USA twitter: @intel_chris

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