On 05/03/2010 01:47 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
This is characterized as "smart" parsing, but I have a less kind word
for it - "hack"
That feature is handy, computer languages are designed for humans first.
Python is now almost twenty years old (appeared in 1991) and in the
meantime that feature has not caused disasters :-)
The problems may or may not be obvious to the user, but they can show up
in buggy third party tools, and fewer third party tools, that must parse
the source code, such as refactorers, IDEs, pretty printers, source code
analyzers, etc.
Gratuitously ambiguous grammars produce the same effect, only more severely.
