Re: parsing C++, was Dragon Book - update necessary?

lex@cc.gatech.edu
22 Oct 2000 01:22:28 -0400

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Re: parsing C++, was Dragon Book - update necessary? lex@cc.gatech.edu (2000-10-22)
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From: lex@cc.gatech.edu
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 22 Oct 2000 01:22:28 -0400
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA, USA
References: 00-10-061 00-10-067 00-10-093 00-10-109 00-10-130
Keywords: parse, C++

Bruce Hoult <bruce@hoult.org> writes:


> Bjarne Stroustrup once said on BIX (hmm .. are you *that* rhyde?) that
> one of his biggest mistakes in cfront was in allowing the other Bell
> Labs guys to convince him to use yacc and that he'd love to have the
> funds to get an intern to redo it as recursive descent. The reason
> was that recursive descent is more work upfront but you get good error
> messages almost for free, while yacc is easy to get going but the work
> required to get decent error messages was nearly unbounded.
>




Of course, nowadays there are yacc-like tools that will generate
recursive-decent parsers. ANTLR comes to mind.




-Lex

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