On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Brian Hurt <[email protected]> wrote: > I think the lesson here is "make your language unparseable, and no one will > be able to parse it". My advice to people designing new languages is to > define their grammar in terms of an LALR(1) parser like yacc, javacc, cup, > etc. And to not let shift-reduce or reduce-reduce conflicts in. One of the > big reasons for this is that any language that is parseable sanely in > LALR(1) is parseable sanely in just about anything else, the converse is not > necessarily true. Fancier parsers such as LL(k) parsers (for example, > Bison) or top-down parsers (parsec, etc.) are great for parsing lanuages > that are hard to parse- the idea is to not make your language such.
This is certainly true for Ruby. There are a few attempts at LALR parsers for Ruby, but none of them have been carried through to production impls. *All* the current mainstream Ruby implementations use the original LL(k) Bison grammar or a port of it to platform-specific variants, largely because the language has a lot of difficult-to-parse contextual syntax. Of course, a lot of that syntax is exactly what people love about Ruby...so it's sometimes a tough call. - Charlie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en.
