10 Mar
2025
10 Mar
'25
2:03 a.m.
everyone should write for their first compiler in
Pascal for a
simple language and no cheating using YACC. You need to write the whole
thing if you want to understand how parsing really works.
Yacc certainly makes it easier to write parsers for big grammars, but
it's far from cheating. You need to know a lot more about parsing to use
Yacc than you need to roll your own.
Hand parsing of a tiny grammar is almost a necessary step on the way to
understanding Yacc. But I think hand-building the whole parser for a
compiler is unnecessary torture--like doing trigonometry with log tables.
Doug