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Re: Interactive parsing with Bison


From: Satya
Subject: Re: Interactive parsing with Bison
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 17:06:22 -0500

> C makes it hard for contributors to go into bison (ask Satya).

So would C++.  C++ combines the danger of C with the complexity of Ada
(and that is an unfair comparison to Ada :-).

Or perhaps your "hard for contributors" argument is based more on the
availability of programmers?  If so, I'm not sure I agree with that
either.  Many younger programmers are learning languages other than
C++.  Java is undoubtedly the most popular right now.  If we switched
to C++ now we would be investing significant effort in a downhill-mode
technology.

its not that C as a language is hard or complex or that not many
programmers are available. I think Akim was referring to the sheer
mass of programming involved..

With C you represent grammar with lists of integers and manipulate
these lists in  tortuous ways to derive other lists - (nullable and
derives and states for example); all this certainly takes a bit of
time to decipher; if we use STL, list programming is reduced to a few
lines of code; and then, we need not represent everything symbol as an
integer; we can have classes for non-terminals and terminals; This
opens gateways to a hierarchy of classes that can model the grammar of
Bison input file. Anyway that was my understanding of what Akim wrote.

Of course Java has definitely better (in fact excellent) support for
all these and more (as demonstrated by SableCC - an LALR parser
generator written in Java). But it would be incredibly slow  if we
compiled it into byte codes; (I understand gcj can generate native
code, but GNU classpath is under development yet?)

Satya.
--
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth".
-Sherlock Holmes, The sign of four.




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