context-free grammar

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday 04 March 2011 17:05:57 Simon Buerger wrote:
> It is often said that D's grammar is easier to parse than C++, i.e. it
> should be possible to seperate syntactic and semantic analysis, which
> is not possible in C++ with the template-"< >" and so on. But I found
> following example:
> 
> The Line "a * b = c;" can be interpreted in two ways:
> -> Declaration of variable b of type a*
> -> (a*b) is itself a lvalue which is assigned to.
> 
> Current D (gdc 2.051) interprets it always in the first way and yields
> an error if the second is meant. The Workaround is simply to use
> parens like "(a*b)=c", so it's not a real issue. But at the same time,
> C++ (gcc 4.5) has no problem to distinguish it even without parens.
> 
> So, is the advertising as "context-free grammar" wrong?

Umm. How could a * b be assigned to? It's definitely not an lvalue. Do you mean 
that an overloaded opBinary!"*" is used which returns a ref? It certainly can't 
be done normally.

- Jonathan M Davis