On Nov 11, 2007 10:26 AM, metaperl.j <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Also, I asked a Ph.D in CS with emphasis on Compiler Design (who is the > author of SableCC, the parser generator that is superior to ANTLR and > JavaCC) about parsing J and here is what he said: > http://lists.sablecc.org/pipermail/sablecc-discussion/msg00146.html
I agree with Randy MacDonald on this one. And I would even go further: Etienne didn't bother studying J enough to make his [potential] point coherently: J's noun/verb syntax is totally unambiguous, syntactically. J's adjective/conjunction syntax is ambiguous, in the general case, because adjectives and conjunctions can produce results which have different syntactic properties, and the general case is roughly equivalent to the halting problem. J's design choices about associativity have nothing to do with these issues, and everything to do with making user defined functions (verbs, whatever) simple. That said, I do not see J's syntactic ambiguities as a particularly big issue. Most potential problems can be solved using good style, and the remaining problems can be resolved by deferring parsing until the syntax is clear. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
