On Sun, 2007-06-24 at 09:33 +1000, Mark Greenaway wrote: > Maybe I should give it another look, if you really think it's that > important. Holidays are coming up, and it would keep me off the > streets :)
Like everyone else I have Aho and Ullman dragon book "Principles of Compiler Design" but it's not the best. One term we had a unit who's name I can't recall but which was essentially "how to write a yacc clone". Except that we didn't really, the exercises were all very tinker-toy-ish. The assigned text was Bornat "Understanding and Writing Compilers" which I still have. So while working full time and attending Sydney "we don't have part time students" University late afternoons and evenings, I decided to write a yacc clone (at the time I had the source but it wasn't legal). Only to discover that there were numerous errors in the assigned text. My most memorable example which had a sentence "if the set of terminal tokens _is_ the empty set then ..." should have read "if the set of sets of terminal tokens _includes_ the empty set then ...". You sure learn a lot about a subject when debugging the textbook. My yacc clone actually worked, right up until I started reading papers on how to handle error states... which Bornat gave whole a hand wavey paragraph and didn't mention is as big as or bigger than the rest of the problem. Anyway, I'm still using the methods used to build the tables for table driven parsers. All they are is push down stacks of state machines, after all. The most recent time was HTML compound element start and finish processing to paper over the inadequacies of a stupid library API that I had no choice about using. I have yet to find a compiler book I actually like, but I only have four, so there is hope yet. Regards Peter Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> /\/\* http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/ PGP public key ID: 1024D/D0EDB64D fingerprint = AD0A C5DF C426 4F03 5D53 2BDB 18D8 A4E2 D0ED B64D See http://www.keyserver.net or any PGP keyserver for public key. "The plural of anecdotes is not data." -- Lee Revell
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