dmd support for IDEs and the D tool chain

Justin Johansson no at spam.com
Mon Oct 19 04:08:18 PDT 2009


Walter Bright Wrote:

> Ellery Newcomer wrote:
> > ANTLR has pretty good support for backtracking, so writing a D grammar
> > for it wasn't too difficult, but then the resultant performance isn't
> > anything near what I'd like.
> 
> My recommendation is to forget about parser generators and just build 
> one by hand. They're easy to write, and you won't have speed problems 
> with them. There are other advantages, too, like better error messages 
> and error recovery.

Walter is 110% correct.   Over the years I've expended enormous amounts
of energy with parser generators esp. with trying to get good error messages
and error recovery (exactly as Walter suggests).  Nearly every time I went
back to a hand-written lexer and recursive descent parser.

To see the KISS principle in action, take a look at Walter's DMDScript internals:
lexer.d and parser.d.

Cheers
Justin Johansson




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