From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Writing a scanner and parser in Ada Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:45:41 +0100 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: <2d87298a-4d1f-446a-9d46-d4f03879246b@googlegroups.com> <285de3c1-6c16-47b3-83b7-ec3419c8d324@googlegroups.com> <2c3f6378-1ec4-4128-ad61-a3bcdde49614@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: TliDXSPe+gBSGCqP3SEJ2Q.user.gioia.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.5.2 Content-Language: en-US X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:49648 Date: 2017-12-26T22:45:41+01:00 List-Id: On 2017-12-26 19:06, Shark8 wrote: > Let's consider a simple example. We want to write a pattern to test > for a list. We'll define a list as being one or more numbers > separated by comma, and enclosed by parentheses. Toy examples prove nothing. > The above seems quite straightforward, and IMO, easier to comprehend > than an equivalent regular expression. Yes SNOBOL is easier to understand than regular expressions, because it was designed as programming language. Regular expressions were not. > So, IMO, SNOBOL itself proves as a counterexample to your claim. No, it does not prove that. Griswold et all give in their book an example of SNOBOL parser written in SNOBOL. Compare that with a parser written in Ada. -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de