I have yet to see a reasonable explanation why C++ needs a type-aware compiler to accomplish its goals. I can't think of any other languages with this problem.

Are you saying strong typing is a problem with C++ as a language? Or am I misunderstanding?

    T *p;

    struct T;
    typedef struct T T;

    int T=5,p=0;

From a practical perspective, this makes the compiler code more complicated, because now the parsed code has to be analyzed and the results fed back to the loop. As well as the obvious negative effects of code that's more complicated, this also means any code analysis tools that work with source code have to themselves do this same work. (For C, this probably isn't too much of a difficulty, but it's still annoying having to keep track of typedef names and so on just so you can parse it! For C++, it's a very big problem indeed, on account of how much stuff you have to keep on top of - and that's why C++ source analysis tools basically never worked properly once you got past a certain level of complexity until people started just using the compiler to do it.)

I don't have an in-depth background in this stuff, so it's possible there are also more abstract benefits from having a grammar that doesn't suffer from this sort of problem.

Compile time speed? Refactoring? Jump-to-definition? Autocomplete? Intellisense? Those are all important for UX, and a tricky-to-parse grammar makes those things mighty challenging.

Another thing about recursive descent, besides the ability to generate very specific error messages, is that it's a naturally intuitive algorithm which is very similar to how humans mentally parse. Perhaps that's also why context-sensitivity is not a problem at all, since natural languages are AFAIK all context-sensitive.

Parser generators are complex, generate huge amounts of virtually undebuggable code, and require learning another language, yet are less flexible than recursive-descent. It's clear why they've fallen out of favour in comparison to simpler and more flexible parsing algorithms.

So a language can be hard to parse unambiguously for machines, but it can be pretty straightforward for humans - like pretty much any natural spoken language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_sen...

Until you realize that there is rarely any proper tooling around the language, which would be really helpful to humans!

I can list clang and cppcheck on Linux, but nothing else so far. Some of the clang related tools still choke on some parts of C++ though, so even that isn't close.