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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about linker
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2024 11:45:36 +0100
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On 03.12.2024 21:49, BGB wrote:
> On 12/3/2024 1:27 PM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>> On 03.12.2024 19:57, BGB wrote:
>>> On 12/2/2024 12:13 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Indeed.  One wonders at Bart's familiarity with formal grammars.
>>>
>>> In my case, personally I haven't encountered much that doesn't work well
>>> enough with a recursive-descent parser.
>>
>> Is that meant as a contradiction? - If so, how?
> 
> Formal grammars and parser generators aren't usually necessary IME,
> since recursive descent can deal with most everything (and is generally
> more flexible than what one can deal with in a formal grammar).

Hmm, okay. We obviously widely disagree here. IMO a language needs a
consistent grammar that one can look up to understand the syntactic
structure of a language as a clean basis for its semantics. (I don't
usually want to read [language implementation-]code (if available in
the first place) to understand the languages' syntactical structure.)

Language and grammar belongs together. Implementing a compiler or an
interpreter for a language where no grammar was (or can be?) defined
sounds absolutely odd to me.

Of course you don't "need" a grammar to _implement_ a language tool,
but it serves (and not only) to build a coherent language. Once you
have a grammar for your language you can then make use of tools and
formal rules to create a reliable outcome.

(There's a small textbook from N. Wirth where he explains compiler
construction (or rather, a specific, simple form of it) based on an
LL(1) grammar and implemented that by a Recursive Descent parser. -
Emphasis on the _grammar_ as base of the design and development! -
I pointed to this example because - I think for simplicity - it also
decided to implement the language using a Recursive Descent parser.
Usually more powerful grammars and parsers are used; LR, LALR, ...)

> 
> Though, it seems I didn't read enough, they were debating about
> syntactic use of semicolons as a separator rather than parser writing...

Right. (Semicolons are a very basic element of a language and its
"formal grammar" that Scott was referring to.)

Janis

> [...]