Re: Ada standard and maximum line lengths

[Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>]

Ok, so this has gone off-topic, I just want put it back on...

I will be implementing a scanner for Ada 2012 and then a parser, I'm wanting to create a subset based on the standard rather than some educational subset which doesn't show how a real compiler actually works.

I will read the entire file into a buffer and then scan the buffer. So, I can either break it into lines which the scanner breaks up into tokens, which seems like extra work. Or, I can read it like I would normally, scan the buffer a character at a time, it's a state machine so I will know when I'm in a comment, etc. so will expect to break the comment at EOL. I can still check the length of an identifier and chuck out a warning if it's too long for the implementation, say 250 characters or whatever.

Also, the method of breaking up the buffer into tokens which have start and end characters is a good one, until you have the AST at this point you should make copies of the lexemes you need and store them in the AST and delete the buffer otherwise the compiler will take up too much memory keeping all that around when you start to implement "with," you will have to read in more specifications and sometimes bodies re generics.

So, in short, I'm wondering whether it really matters to parse by breaking up into lines or not.

Thanks,
Luke.