Re: language neutral parser

[Hans Aberg]

At 21:22 +0100 2001/11/08, Axel Kittenberger wrote:
>Maybe I'm too dump to see, but isn't the order bison writes out the tables
>currently for C not the only valid order?

You still speak about the order of the finished result, not the order of
the entries in the course of the algorithm.

>In example XSL scripts can walk through the node tree multiple times, this
>costs effectivness yes, but you can access the fields in any order, without
>having to worry inside of bison of the final order. This is what I would tell
>as task seperation between some small applications (""the unix way of
>computing"")

So is your suggestion that Bison should write XML and only that?

>And honestly I don't write the bison goals, but from my view bison
>compiletime speed is one of the most less important features.

It is true that in current Bison, speed isn't crucial. But if it should be
augmented with new features, say other, more complex algorithms, inverting
of tables and such, it might be important. Also you want to traverse trees
and the like many times, then the time complexity might become prohibitive,
so that whereas times are reasonable with small grammars, they become
impossible with large grammars.

  Hans Aberg