Re: detecting ambiguous grammars

Chris F Clark wrote:
> Disasters like the C declaration syntax or its worse variant in C++
> should be relegated to history books.


Considering the tiny, slow computers of the early 70s, how did this
gruesome syntax happen? It seems that it wouldn't be any easier to
parse then, and the syntax has only gotten a little more complicated.
Are we tied down by our tools?


  - ken
[The original Unix C compiler was two passes each of which fit in 24K
bytes. It used recursive descent for most things, operator precedence
for expressions. The idea of C declaration syntax is that the
declaration of something looks like the way that you use it. I agree
that it's debatable how good an idea that turned out to be. -John]

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