Aug. 21, 2002
8:21 p.m.
"ZW" == Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:
ZW> You might be interested to know that over in GCC land we're ZW> changing the C++ front end to use a hand-written recursive ZW> descent parser. It's not done yet, but we expect it to be ZW> easier to maintain, faster, and better at generating diagnostics ZW> than the existing yacc-based parser. LCC also uses a hand-written recursive descent parser, for exactly the reasons you mention. Thought I'd also mention a neat new paper about an old algorithm for recursive descent parsers with backtracking and unlimited lookahead. Packrat Parsing: Simple, Powerful, Lazy, Linear Time, Bryan Ford. ICFP 2002 http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub.html Jeremy