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From: jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin)
Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
Date: 1996/03/16
Message-ID: <4id4cc$1rau@saba.info.ucla.edu>#1/1
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references: <00001a73+00002504@msn.com>  
organization: University of California, Los Angeles
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Date: 1996-03-16T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

kcline@sun132.spd.dsccc.com (Kevin Cline) writes:

>Maybe, but I personally find it much easier to maintain lex & yacc
>grammers which make the file syntax explicit, instead of trying to
>divine the syntax from scanf statements scattered throughout a dozen
>subroutines.

If you have to parse something, fine use lex and yacc.  If it is
simple I prefer to use simple IO statements of the language.  Parsing
is really only needed when there are nested structures in the text.
As a user, I do not want to read a grammer for a text file format.
As a programmer annotated grammers do not do much for me either.

>The scanf programmers tend to define their input file syntax to make
>it easy to parse, rather than easy to read, and then resist all
>suggestions to extend the syntax for user convenience.

I personally do not find complex text file formats as an exceptable
user friendly method of input in this day and age.  Users should look
at GUI's not goofy text files.  Thus, slight differences in the
flexiblity of file formats is really of little concern these days as
no one should be really looking at them. Besides grammer style legacy
text file formats I see little use for parsing besides writing your
own C++ or Ada95 or other language compiler ( or pretty printer, etc).
Something I am not planning to do anytime soon.  So has GUI's and huge
languages really ruined the usefulness of parsing, or am I forgetting
some important uses of parsers.

Jay