Agreed. Lex and Yacc solved the logistical problem of interpreting syntax
rule sets on static lexical tokens without writing a lot of code.
Otherwise, very little productivity gain was made by using them. The Gries
book (and others like it) did a whole lot more to show people how to
organize compilers and interpreters though. (01)
-Rich (02)
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com (03)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Francis McCabe
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:20 PM
To: edbark@xxxxxxxx; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fw: Next steps in using ontologies as standards (04)
Could not help jumping in on this one ed... (05)
Having written more than 12 compilers in my time; I would have to
state that lex and yacc 'solve' an extremely small part of the
problem. So small that I actually rarely use them... (06)
Frank (07)
On Jan 6, 2009, at 2:47 PM, Ed Barkmeyer wrote: (08)
>
> One other note: What really made compilers a "commodity" was:
> - Dave Gries's book in 1972 that taught children all the basics of
> compiler writing that we professionals had struggled to learn in the
> 1960s; and
> - yacc and lex, Unix-based freeware tools of 1976 that allowed the
> programmer to write a grammar and generated a C implementation of the
> parser for it, leaving the user to complete the semantic stubs. Yes,
> you had to learn something about symbol tables and code generation --
> read Gries.
>
> My NIST predecessor in the Pascal standards effort, Justin Walker,
> used
> yacc and lex to write a Pascal compiler/interpreter, with almost no
> previous background in compiler writing. (09)
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