Re: [QUERY] A "ignorant newbie" question about compiler-writing.

J. Kanze wrote:


> What makes it hard(er) is that the programmers don't cooperate. If
> you accept that the compiler just aborts after the first error, it
> will be a lot simpler. Of course, I'd never buy such a compiler:-).


Well, I remember using Turbo Pascal 3.0, and it was quite a usable
product, for reasonably sized projects. Deciding not to take error
recovery into account has several implications, and I believe it is
mainly a matter of making the proper compromise, between ease of use
and performance. Such a design implies a well-integrated environment
(quite easy to do with virtually any available text editor today), a
bit of liberality to resist some errors (missing semicolon in some
contexts), but it can give you unmatched parsing performance.


I'd agree with you if you refuse such a design in case of a C
compiler, that must parse large amounts of header files before getting
to the real work, but in many contexts, no error recovery can be a
smart and cost effective compromise.


Cheers,


Darius


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