Hi everyone, I have been learning Clojure for a little bit now and had thought about using the language to try to explore compilation/language parsing. I had a lot of trouble getting a recursive-descent parser implementation implemented in the language, and was hoping someone might be able to shed some light on what I'm missing.
So, from what I understand, the simplest of the recursive descent implementations just has you define a bunch of functions, each of which is capable of yielding a production for the left side of a simple (say, LL1 grammar). And then you kick off the parsing process by calling one of the functions, which ends up having all the others called like a domino effect until parsing is complete. Here's the crux of my problem: in an immutable world, is there any simple manageable way to get that model to work? It seems to me that you can't get around the need for a global, mutable stream that every function is capable of popping items off of. I have this impression because I don't see how else the recursion would work - if my top-level function, A, says "grab the first element and compile program", I expect that by the time it gets execution control back, it should not see anything really left in the stream of parsable tokens - the stream should have been consumed by the cascade of other functions that were called. I gave up on using refs/atoms, and ended up looking at parser combinators like Parsatron, but in all honesty, they are a little over my head at the moment. Thanks for any advice on this matter, or any other insight about getting started with topics in compilation! -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
