Re: Yacc and a calculator

Dan Weinlader <weinlade@fugue.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> I have been reading the lex & yacc book by Levine, Mason and Brown and have
> a question on how to extend the calculator example. Suppose I wish to allow
> the user to enter 8 5 and have it parsed as 8*5, how do I do that?


if your grammar doesn't contain any unary operator with the same
token as a binary operator, you can use a %left directive together with
%prec, as in the following grammar:


        %left '+'
        %left DUMMY


        %%


        program: expr '\n' ;


        expr: digit
                        | expr '+' expr
                        | expr expr %prec DUMMY
                        | '(' expr ')'
                        ;


        digit: '0' | '1' | '2';


and ignore the shift/reduce conflicts. I've tried this grammar and
everything works fine. On the other hand, if you have, for example,
an unary + operator it could be a good idea tryng to disambiguate
things at lexer level. I remember SNOBOL used the following
convention: if an operator was followed by a space, it was a binary
operator, else if was a unary one. I hope this can help you.


--
Pasquale Foggia, PhD student | #include <disclaimer.h>
University of Naples "Federico II" | finger foggia@amalfi.dis.unina.it for
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