Re: Parser rewritting

[Keith Seitz <keiths@redhat.com>]

On 03/30/2010 02:18 PM, Tom Tromey wrote:
> Also, there is no good way in bison to disable a production only when
> the parsing language is C++.  You can play games by returning different
> tokens in different modes, or you can run a preprocessor on the grammar,
> but both of those are pretty ugly.

Do we really need to worry about C vs C++? How dangerous would it be to 
simply assume C++? [I know there is a subtle difference between the two, 
I just wonder whether it would matter that much in usage to warrant 
treating the two differently/independently.]

I also worry more about three other areas that might influence 
design/implementation decisions:

1) Java? Okay, we could probably work around this by using the current 
parser for java (ick!) [Do we even consider adding java to the mix worth 
it? I don't, but that's just my opinion...]

2) Linespec re-evaluation: Let's face it, a number of us have had to 
deal with problems in linespec.c, and we all know it's a nightmare. 
Anyone (else) interested in moving to expressions-based linespec processing?

3) Symbol table cleanups: I get a sinking feeling that the symbol table 
API may need some work before any attempt at writing a new parser my be 
started.

Specifically, when a symbol lookup happens, we should get ALL matching 
symbols, not just the first one found. [Maybe that's just me?] I know 
this was a constant barricade when trying to implement overload 
resolution in the parser. And to this day, we cannot implement overload 
resolution on a non-class function. A nice side-effect of this: it would 
help with symbol completion.

Heck, I might even just settle for something that says there are 
multiple matches...


Keith