Re: Ignore break line sometimes

"Geovani de Souza" <geovanisouza92@gmail.com> wrote


> I'm trying write an parser to my compiler, and I'm interessed to ignore
> the break line (\n) sometimes. E.g:
>
> if true then [\n]
> foo(); [\n]
> end; [\n]
>
> So, in the first line, the '\n' after 'then' isn't important, but in the
> second "foo();" could replace the need of the semicolon to conclude the
> statement, or still, in the 'end'.
>
> To ignore '\n' in the white lines.


I've tried a few schemes. One just converts a newline to a semicolon,
*unless* the last symbol was (for example) a comma.


This requires some sort of continuation symbol for when a semicolon would be
inappropriate.


And it helps if the grammar is tolerant of extra semicolons, otherwise the
source code could be full of continuation symbols! (After 'then' for
example.)


Whatever scheme you choose, you'll know it works well when you have
thousands of lines of code without a single semicolon, and hardly any
continuations. And that is perfectly clear to read.


--
Bartc

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