[dmd-internals] How important are the exact formats of __DATE__, __TIME__, and __TIMESTAMP___?

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Wed Mar 9 11:18:21 PST 2011


On Wednesday, March 09, 2011 09:28:05 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 9 mar 2011, at 05:52, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Tuesday 08 March 2011 20:46:49 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >> I understand. If I could, I'd kindly discourage you from working on it.
> >> Its existence would stifle the impetus to work on general lexing and
> >> parsing frameworks (a la highly integrated lex/yacc using D's
> >> generational capabilities). Those in turn would push the compiler
> >> forward and would help fixing bugs, and would offer the proverbial
> >> fishing rod (tools for parsing any language) instead of fish (a lexer
> >> and a parser for D itself).
> > 
> > Well, I fully support a generic lexer, but I also see value in a lexer
> > which closely follows what the front end is doing for D. But it's not
> > like I've been making huge progress on it and am about to submit it for
> > review. I have too much other stuff on my plate to blow through it like
> > that.
> > 
> > Though honestly, if I were to be writing a lexer and/or parser for a
> > compiler of any kind, I'd just do it by hand. It's a lot more flexible
> > that way. So, even if a solid, generic D lexing tool existed, I'm not
> > sure that I'd use it for anything.
> > 
> > In any case, as I understood it, the result of that original discussion
> > was that we wanted to have a generic lexing solution (and presumably a
> > corresponding parsing solution following that) but that we still want a
> > lexer and parser for D which are close to what the C++ front end is
> > doing. So, as requested, I've slowly been working on that.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> > _______________________________________________
> > dmd-internals mailing list
> > dmd-internals at puremagic.com
> > http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/dmd-internals
> 
> I completely agree with this, that we need a D lexer (preferably a whole
> frontend) written in D, included in the standard library. I even hope that
> one day DMD will use that lexer.
> 
> BTW, are basing your work on DDMD?

No. I haven't looked at DDMD. Walter wanted a fairly direct port of the C++ 
frontend (with appropriate tweaks for D, but he wants to make sure that it's 
straightforward to port fixes from one to the other). So, I've just been 
directly, porting the C++ frontend, adjusting it to be somewhat more idiomatic D 
as appropriate but generally keeping it fairly close to the C++ implementation.

- Jonathan M davis


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