Re: How to change default outcome of shift/reduce conflict?

[Hans Aberg]

At 13:56 -0700 2002/01/16, Scott Raney wrote:
>Hey, and that's an easy one.  Wait until you get to "the number of
>card", at which point the next token could be "button", at which point
>"number" is a property, or "buttons", at which point it's a function.

I am not sure why this would be a problem, because the Bison parser selects
the rule based on a one lookahead token.

>> Otherwise, I think this is a sign of poor language design. If you later
>> want to design your own scripting language, then you should avoid the
>> confusion that will inevitably arise by the "or"'s having different
>> semantic meaning.
>
>Natural language has always been a major headache for computer-science
>types specifically because of these kinds of token ambiguities.  But I
>wouldn't go so far as to say HT is an example of poor design (well, it
>does have its flaws, but this kind of multi-use token isn't one of
>them).  It's just much more English-like than is convenient for
>language implementers ;-)

The problem arises when interfacing with the humans interact with the
compiler, and need to avoid producing errors: The less the error depends on
context information, the easier it is for the computer to catch and produce
a correct error, it seems.

  Hans Aberg