Re: Scripting

[Hollis Blanchard]

On Feb 13, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Marco Gerards wrote:

> Serbinenko Vladimir <address@hidden> writes:
> > > What kind of parser is it?
> > It's a direct parser with aritmetic subparser. Main parser is
> > grub_bash_execute, arithmetic subparser is grub_bash_eval_arith.
> > grub_bash_execute determinates the special cases (loops,conditions,
> > functions,...) for other cases (commands,assignments, function 
> > calling)
> > it calls grub_bash_split_tokens, grub_bash_expand_braces and
> > grub_bash_expand_dollar
> >
> > >  I have never seen this in a top-down or bottom-up parser I have
> > >  studied.
> > I don't like to write the things reffering every time to algorithm.
> > Genereally I take some ideas and I write myself, at my own.
>
> What do you mean?
>
> The problem is that I like proven concepts.  And when you use a
> commonly known parser design many people will be able to understand
> it.  To me this is REALLY important.  I wonder what other developers
> think of that.

I agree. Hand-written parsers are very hairy to implement, with nasty 
bugs and corner cases. Although I haven't studied the theory, I know 
that there are traditional parsing/lexing/whatever techniques that are 
well-understood.

In fact, there's a whole bunch of tools like flex and bison that we 
could use to avoid hand-written errors. Why don't we use those?

-Hollis