Why use a DFA instead of DIP1000?

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 14/09/2025 3:09 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> DIP1000 is necessary when the DFA is faced with only a function 
> prototype rather than having the body of the function available.

I'm curious as to why you said this.

There are only three differences I can come up with between a classical 
DFA and DIP1000:

- Attributes and lack thereof
- Single forward pass vs work list algorithm
- In the type system (storage classes ugh), vs lint level or 
optimization level

Any variation of the three can be present in a _modern_ frontend DFA.

The delineation between the two is basically nonexistent from my 
perspective. Unless you are not referring to modern frontend DFA, and 
actually mean classical DFA's which are indeed quite different.