On 09/17/2018 03:35 PM, William Park via talk wrote:
On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 08:54:29AM -0400, Matthew Gordon via talk wrote:
I'd also recommend against Yacc. As others have said, it's a great tool and
very powerful but a recursive descent parser will do the job 99% of the
time and will be much easier. Writing a good unambiguous grammar for Yacc
can be tricky and is much more difficult to debug than a recursive descent
parser. A lot of languages now have "parser combinator" libraries which
make it even easier to write a recursive descent parser. I'd do a google
search to see if there's one available for your programming language of
choice.
Language is C; environment is embedded board of consumer/business
printers; and, the nature of work is QA, where I'm trying to introduce
more automation. So, for C, what parser library would you use? I take
it, there is difference between "parser generator" and "parse
combinator".
Having worked in building and supporting compilers years ago I would
argue the Yacc and Lex are a better way to build a parser because it
forces you to think a bit about design.
I tend to like tools that have a formal underpinning and work with a
design over ad-hoc systems where the result is directly tied to the
ability of the programmer to think ahead and avoid problems.
It sounds like your looking to try and build a domain-specific language
and you may have more luck with finding an existing language that you
can use.
Building and maintaining a programming language can quickly become a
full time job and is an amazingly thankless job.
--
Alvin Starr || land: (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133
al...@netvel.net ||
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