declaration/expression

[Tim Matthews]

Ellery Newcomer wrote:

> 
> Yeah, you're missing the point. The point is the D Language is billed as
> one whose lexer is completely independent of its parser, which is
> completely independent of its semantic analysis. The parser must be able
> to decide all of these without any help from semantic. Anything less is
> either failure or just plain wrong.


So you are following those steps from 
http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/lex.html. I don't think these are strict 
restrictions to allow your tool to be called a D language parser 
preventing you from re parsing. I think it is really trying to point out 
the first few steps and perhaps should be re written as:

1 source character set
The source file is checked to see what character set it is, and the 
appropriate scanner is loaded. ASCII and UTF formats are accepted.
2 script line
If the first line starts with #! then the first line is ignored.
3 parse

Also from this page http://digitalmars.com/d/2.0/overview.html
features to drop: C source code compatibility.

This is not valid code with dmd v2.030 because D is not strictly 
compatible with C/C+.

struct A
{
     int i;
}

void main()
{
     A(a);
}

Now that I've tested that with structs, classes, and typedef'd int none 
of which worked. This does compile however:

void main()
{
     int(a);
     a = 2;
}

 From that dmd compatibility should be far simpler but going beyond that 
would be nicer.

> it is infinitely better than mixing
> semantic and syntactic analysis

I didn't recommend that.


> But question remains: how does the compiler decide this?

Built in types have the extra C compatibility. Dmd doesn't like this 
though and if it matters to you enough, report it as a bug:

alias int T;

void main()
{
     T(a);
     a = 2;
}


> 
> You are right, though, none of this is complex, just tedious. Reading
> the compiler's source code especially, though it sounds like I'm not
> going to get answers any other way.


If you have a parser that allows that syntax to work a bit more than 
could you please provide an example of code here that is completely 
ambiguous to the compiler.