Re: Head scratching in language X superior to language Y



thomas.mertes@xxxxxx wrote:

The fellow student who did the Ada compiler told me about problems
in parsing an Ada program. He told me that he needed an extra
function to determine what meaning a parenthesis has. When you
compare this to Pascal which can be parsed with LL(1) such
complexity can be seen as unneccessary. A prototype implementation
would have shown such hard to parse parts and the specification
could have been changed before releasing it.

I know what I am talking about: Seed7
did exist on paper for a long time. . . . Using the feedback
from an implementation helped to succeed finally in the
implementation of Seed7. This incremental process leads IMHO to
better results (for big and complex problems).

One of the properties of Wirth languages is ease of implementation
it wasn't an accident. Most of his ideas and syntax were tested as he
developed them. Having to work around parsing issues makes
implementations prone to incompatibilities.


Regards,

--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
Tel. (519) 888-6911
http://www.bytecraft.com
walter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx





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