Linked by David Adams on Thu 10th Jul 2008 19:44 UTC, submitted by Sandro Hartley
Computerworld interviews Stephen C. Johnson, the brains behind YACC Yet Another Compiler Compiler: The compiler was developed some 35 years ago and is still going strong today through various incarnations. Asked what he is proudest of in terms of YACC's development and use, Johnson said: "I think computing is a service profession. I am happiest when the programs that I have written (YACC, Lint, the Portable C Compiler) are useful to others. In this regard, the contribution YACC made to the spread of Unix and C is what I'm proudest of." And would he do anything differently? "I'd try harder to find a notation other than $1, $2, $$, etc. While simple and intuitive, the notation is a source of errors as grammars evolve."
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Member since:
2006-01-11
I've used Bison myself and quite appreciate that tool but I feel that for large compiler projects with insane syntax, some people are going back to hand crafted parsers, that was done in GCC to handle C++ syntax with all error processing...
There are many aternative to Bison/Yacc, like ANTLR or Spirit, and for functional languages, "parser combinators" and monads...