On 2013-04-02 15:21, Stewart Gordon wrote:
Indeed, the published grammar needs to be thoroughly checked against
what DMD is actually doing, and any discrepancies fixed (or filed in
Bugzilla to be fixed in due course). And then they need to be kept in
sync.
Has the idea of using a parser generator to build D's parsing code been
rejected in the past, or is hand-coding just the way Walter decided to
do it? Is the code any more efficient than what a typical parser
generator would generate?
And all disambiguation rules (such as "if it's parseable as a
DeclarationStatement, it's a DeclarationStatement") need to be made
explicit as part of the grammar. I suppose this is where using Bison or
similar would help, as it would point out any ambiguities in the grammar
that need rules to resolve them.
I'm wondering if it's possibly to mechanically check that what's in the
grammar is how DMD behaves.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
