Sean Kelly wrote:
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article
Sean Kelly wrote:
Sounds like HTTP/HTML. The best I've come up with so far for parsing
that stuff is to have the lexer actually return tokens representing whitespace
in some instances. It's totally ridiculous.
When you see ad-hoc designs like that, it's obvious the designer has no
experience with compilers. It's why every programmer should take a basic
course in compiler design <g>.
I very much agree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that my compiler design
course was the single most valuable CS course I took while in college. It's
amazing how many problems I encounter have something to do with parsing
or language translation. It's also amazing how many crappy parsers there
are out there for these same tasks. Clearly, compiler design doesn't get
as much attention as it should in undergrad CS.
Sometimes I need to have a command line UI in a program. Such programs
usually have 5 to 10 commands, with their parameters. One command per line.
So far I have tested and split the command line with regular
expressions, because using a parser generator has felt like shooting
mosquitos with a shotgun.
What would your strategy be?
