On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 05:58, Eray Ozkural wrote:
>  The only sad thing about these systems is that they are not 
> written in ocaml. :) 

An Earley parser is easy to make, RD even easier
although it's a bit harder in that case to get the
grammar right.

The main problem is handling the silly identifier/typename
distinction, which is easy to do .. and hard to *undo*:
forgetting things is vital for a functional parser.
Tying the lexer and parser together solves this problem.

I assume performance isn't as vital to you as actually
parsing the input. Earley seems quite feasible for C++,
since in practice there are enough 'stopping symbols'
to restrict the O(n^3) performance problem to small
enough n to be practical.

The bottom line here is that it is a lot of work
to elaborate all the grammar productions, especially
if you want to take MSC/gnu extensions into account
and handle "C" as well (since C has distinct
rules for some things like enums and nested classes).

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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