Re: language neutral parser

[Hans Aberg]

At 19:50 +0100 2001/11/08, Axel Kittenberger wrote:
>I still not understand ... isn't the order required by parser algorithmn
>specified? I don't think you can mix up the tables....

You probably mix up the order by the order that the arrays entries are
computed in the course of the algorithm:

I just describe a general problem when producing programs that should
translate binary data into written files. Typically, the data is produced
in an order different than the order by which it should be written. The
workaround is to produce various containers that can hold the information
while it is computed, and write the files afterwards. So rather than then
writing XML and let an XML tool do that, one produces a language that can
act on the binary data directly.

It is not that hard, at least not if the variation of the output of the
data should be too exotic and the input binary data is (as in the case of
Bison) is simple.

In the case of Bison, you would probably not be able to only write XML and
no other language without first demonstrating practically that the approach
is a good one. So you still end up of having Bison to be able to write
several different languages. Then this approach simplifies, as new
algorithms can easily be implemented without having to worry about writing
the output.

  Hans Aberg