On 09/17/2018 03:35 PM, William Park via talk wrote:
I'd also recommend against Yacc. As others have said, it's a great tool and very powerful but a recursive descent parser will do the job 99% of the time and will be much easier. Writing a good unambiguous grammar for Yacc can be tricky and is much more difficult to debug than a recursive descent parser. A lot of languages now have "parser combinator" libraries which make it even easier to write a recursive descent parser. I'd do a google search to see if there's one available for your programming language of choice. Language is C; environment is embedded board of consumer/business
On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 08:54:29AM -0400, Matthew Gordon via talk wrote: printers; and, the nature of work is QA, where I'm trying to introduce more automation. So, for C, what parser library would you use? I take it, there is difference between "parser generator" and "parse combinator". Having worked in building and supporting compilers years ago I would argue the Yacc and Lex are a better way to build a parser because it forces you to think a bit about design. I tend to like tools that have a formal underpinning and work with a design over ad-hoc systems where the result is directly tied to the ability of the programmer to think ahead and avoid problems.
It sounds like your looking to try and build a domain-specific language and you may have more luck with finding an existing language that you can use. Building and maintaining a programming language can quickly become a full time job and is an amazingly thankless job. -- Alvin Starr || land: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||