On Sunday, 12 June 2016 at 06:45:58 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
I should know this, but…
Is there an official D grammar (EBNF or otherwise) or is the
language
defined by the DMD parser?
I am looking to continue Kingsley's DLanguage IntelliJ IDEA
plugin and for that it is necessary to have a grammar
specification. Kingsley has been working on one, but there may
be differences between it and 2.071. Given the compilers and
all the supporting tools either there is one language
specification they all work with or there is a lot of
fragmented viewpoints as to what D actually is. I am hoping the
latter is not the case.
If you attempt to give the language specification to a parser
generator like ANTLR you will quickly discover that the spec is
reverse-engineered from the implementation, and that the spec is
ambiguous in many places. The spec, being derived from the
implementation is not really aware of the existence of the
ambiguities, and doesn't say how to resolve them.
