Original discussion forked in the D grammar thread, so I'm opening a new one for this specific issue. The D grammar is in dire need of an overhaul.
I suggest we discuss changes here and then put everything into github to issue a pull request once everything's done. I already forked the d-programming-language.org repo to get started by fixing some mistakes. Hereafter I list some issues that come to my mind. Alongside missing things (like @attributes I think) and smaller mistakes parts of it like the whole declarations subgrammar are overly complex and allow strange constructs, partly cause C style arrays and function pointers are still in there even though considered harmful and thus deprecated. (see http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/declaration.html) Furthermore function declarations are obscurely woven into all those productions. So, correct me if I'm wrong but the current grammar even allows monsters like auto ubyte[] ([] bar []) (T)(int i) const if(someCodition) = 2 , foo = 5 ; Also, like Rainer proposed, BasicType2 should be somehow pulled out of Declarator to get rid of the DeclaratorInitializer-DeclaratorIdentifierList-DeclaratorIdentifier construct which CMIIW only exists to disallow multiple types: int a, *b; >> isn't AutoDeclaration already covered by Decl -> StorageClasses Decl and so >> on? Ok it's just an misleading name. It covers not only declarations with 'auto' but all Declarations where no type but only a StorageClass is given: shared a = 5; >> Also there are 3 different instances of mixin: MixinExpression, >> MixinStatement and MixinDeclaration. Even though they all come down to the >> same thing. > I think, the different mixin variants are ok, because you might want to > generate different AST for these. Well I can imagine that MixinStatement is necessary because if you have an ExpStatement with a MixinExpression the result is probably discarded (just like 'a' is discarded in a = 5;). But why do you need another MixinDeclaration? >> Modifiers like shared are repeated, e.g. in BasicType, Attribute, >> TypeSpecialization. > Yes the confusion of const/shared/immutable etc in > Attribute,StorageClass,Types,etc causes a lot of headaches.
