Two languages, too similar, competing in the same space.

[Gerson Kurz]

On Sat, 29 Dec 2001 13:40:16 -0500, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

>gerson.kurz at t-online.de (Gerson Kurz) wrote:
>> Call me oldfashioned, but I don't like exception handling - I like
>> if-then-else and error checking style.
>
>I've been writing lots of parsers lately, for every sort of data file we 
>use..Anyway, genericFileParser includes a parseError() method. A
>specific file  parser subclass can just do:
>
>   If len(blurfl) != 42:
>      self.parseError ('bogus length for blurfl')
>
>and you end raising genericFileParser.ParseError with an argument of 
>something like 'parse error in file foo.baz, line 47: bogus length for 
>blurfl').  The really nice thing is it could have been generated deep in a 
>function call chain, and I don't have to worry about propigating the error 
>indication back up the chain.

Well, you've certainly come to the right person ;) Check

http://p-nand-q.com/languages.htm

for some programming languages I've written, none of the
implementations require exception handling. Also check out "The Great
Python Language Zoo", a bunch of loosely related programming
languages, all implemented in python and all using the same internal
code representation. 

http://p-nand-q.com/gplz/gplz.htm

A very simple syntax plus implementation

http://p-nand-q.com/gplz/dist/easy.txt

Granted, most are not state machines, just backward recursive parsers
- but that's ok by my book ;)