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A comment on Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf] by patrec on Friday January 31, 2020 @05:56PM (#22206802)
I'm guilty of being overly hyperbolic, and you are right to correct me. But if your poster boys to illustrate the benefits of parser generators forcing you to write a declarative grammar which a human can understand are perl, bash or even postgresql, I'm not sure what to say ;)

Apart from Go, (and maybe PHP, which I don't know well enough to judge) all the languages you list have pretty horrible syntax that probably few (ruby?) to basically none of its users (bash, perl, C++, postgresql) really understand.

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Re:Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf] by hyperpape on Friday January 31, 2020 @06:17PM (#22206981)
Agreed. I'm not going to say whether Ruby syntax is nice or not, but its use of parser generators is not a model of simplicity:

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/parse.y

https://whitequark.org/blog/2013/04/01/ruby-hacking-guide-ch...

It also changes syntax in patch level versions: https://github.com/whitequark/parser.

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Re:Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth [pdf] by hasbot on Friday January 31, 2020 @06:07PM (#22206902)
> if your poster boys to illustrate the benefits of parser generators forcing you to write a declarative grammar which a human can understand are perl, bash or even postgresql, I'm not sure what to say ;)

And that is a straw man argument because, of course, no one is saying that.

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