On Wednesday 21 August 2002 09:50 pm, Zack Weinberg wrote: ...
You might be interested to know that over in GCC land we're changing the C++ front end to use a hand-written recursive descent parser. It's not done yet, but we expect it to be easier to maintain, faster, and better at generating diagnostics than the existing yacc-based parser.
Interesting! This reminds me of a long-ago interview with Borland's techies about how they had managed to create Turbo Pascal, which ran well in a 64K (K, not M-) one-floppy PC, when their competitor, Microsoft Pascal, forced one to do a lot of disc-jockeying even with 256K and 2 floppies. Basically, their take was "we just did everything by the Dragon Book -- except that the parser is a hand-written recursive descent parser [Aho &c being adamant defenders of Yacc & the like], which buys us a lot" ... Alex