The Super Tiny Compiler

Re:The Super Tiny Compiler by alcover on Thursday March 02, 2023 @09:54PM (#35005248)

I'm struggling with this idea. You could end up tokenizing the inside of an unopened string literal for (contrived) ex :

  String s = hello world";
  [-> typename:'String' id's' op'=' id'hello' id'world' ...]

And it would cascade if then

  foo("blah"); (...)
  [-> strlit';\nfoo(' id'blah' ...]

A parser-first approach will stop with

  unknown id 'hello'

and avoid the cascade.

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Re:The Super Tiny Compiler by swatcoder on Thursday March 02, 2023 @10:06PM (#35005307)

In a mature product, you would apply heuristics to help you provide the most useful feedback to the user while optimizing the time it takes to do so.

Users love consolidated, efficient feedback without having to peel back errors one at a time. It’s a distinguishing feature when you can find a way to do it that suits your input, and specifically so because it can be a hard problem to solve well!

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Re:The Super Tiny Compiler by 1letterunixname on Thursday March 02, 2023 @11:33PM (#35005839)

Precise diagnostics usually follow one of 2 approaches:

1. Hand-written, recursive descent

2. Error matching expanded grammar beyond minimal gramar

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Re:The Super Tiny Compiler by 1letterunixname on Thursday March 02, 2023 @11:31PM (#35005825)

Strings typically have a token state context. Antlr allows pushing and popping a context state. Not a CFG and won't work with simple tools or book approaches.

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Re:The Super Tiny Compiler by PretzelPirate on Friday March 03, 2023 @09:09AM (#35009820)

Check out this section of Crafting Interpreters on Error Recovery: https://craftinginterpreters.com/parsing-expressions.html#pa...

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