4 ms·
At the age of 40, I strongly believe that I'd have been much more productive, had I invested at least as much energy into creating languages as I did into learn
by psyc 9y ago
At the age of 40, I strongly believe that I'd have been much more productive, had I invested at least as much energy into creating languages as I did into learning how to tame C++. Doing so in a structured way, more elegant than writing more parsers and compilers in C, sounds like a good idea.
- pjmlp 9y agoI always liked C++, but having had the luck of experimenting many alternative concepts during the university (FP, LP, GC system programming languages) I never bought into the idea of using the C/lex/yacc trio. Always preferred more productive ways to prototype programming languages.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoMy first introduction to creating languages was encountering lex/yacc. I tried that and quickly run away in disgust.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoMany of lex/yacc flaws (flaky syntax, global mutable state…) have nothing to do with their fundamentals. Also, LALR is bad, you want a generalised parser that can work on any context free grammar (Bison has such a mode). We need no-nonsense lexer and parser generators, that are easy to use, easy to deploy, not too hard to implement, and generate fast parsers. My own studies¹ suggest it can be done. Unfortunately, I'm busy earning a salary right now. [1]: http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/ http://loup-vaillant.fr/tutorials/earley-parsing/
- pjmlp 9y agoYou just gave something to go over during the weekend. :)
- otabdeveloper 9y ago> Doing so in a structured way, more elegant than writing more parsers and compilers in C, sounds like a good idea. http://www.gbresearch.com/axe/ http://www.gbresearch.com/axe/
- otabdeveloper 9y ago> Doing so in a structured way, more elegant than writing more parsers and compilers in C, sounds like a good idea. http://www.gbresearch.com/axe/ http://www.gbresearch.com/axe/