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Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:39:49 -0400
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Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:374 comp.lang.ada:6379
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Date: 2009-07-25T13:39:49-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:26:11 -0700 (PDT), tm wrote:
> 
>> On 20 Jul., 17:14, Jean-Pierre Rosen <ro...@adalog.fr> wrote:
>>> Parsing is not the difficult part of an Ada compiler.
>> I once met somebody, who wrote the front end of an Ada compiler, and
>> he told me a different story. E.g.: He said that a special function
>> needs to read ahead just to find out the semantic of a parenthesis.
> 
> There is no need to know the semantics of parenthesis in order to parse
> them. Semantic analysis is anther compilation phase.
> 
> The only moderately difficult part of Ada that requires short look ahead
> are digraphs like "and then" (overloaded with "and"). There can be comments
> and new lines between "and" and "then" in the digraph. However it does not
> require any roll backs.

IIRC "and then" is not that big an issue. The bigger issue is the two 
uses of single quotes: they delimit character constants, and they are 
used for qualified expressions. Consider an expression such as

      Foo'(',',',',',' ... )

Even with this complication, Ada is not a hard language to parse. C++ 
poses a considerably greater challenge, due to the dual use of < and > 
for both comparisons and for bracketing template parameters.

>> Another friend told me
>> stories about a buggy early Ada compiler where it was necessary to
>> "code around" compiler bugs.
> 
> This problem still exist. (:-() This is not language specific, Delphi,
> Borland C++, MSVC are no less buggy.
> 


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