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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about linker
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:46:50 +0100
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 11.12.2024 16:28, David Brown wrote:
> On 11/12/2024 09:43, Ike Naar wrote:
>> On 2024-12-09, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> An unambiguous grammar is something quite essential; [...]
>>
>> [ dangling-else sample ]
> 
> Given that the resolution is in the "semantics" section rather than the
> "syntax" section, it might seem like a grammatical ambiguity.  But I
> don't think it is, technically - the syntax rules say that the set of
> tokens making up "if (E1) if (E2) S1 else S2" are valid syntax.  It is
> up to the semantics to determine what the code will do here.  (And the
> semantics are unambiguous.)

I'm a bit ambivalent about that. - Yes, technically it's syntax, it's
syntactically probably correct, and it has a semantical ambiguity that
needs to be resolved. All languages with the dangling-else property do
resolve that. But the syntax could have been defined in a way that such
that a dangling else cannot appear in the first place. (Not in "C" and
descendant languages, of course; that ship has sailed.) - Personally I
thus appreciate languages with if-then-elif-else-fi sorts of syntaxes.

Janis