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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: syntactic extensions
Message-ID: <524@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 91 14:52:49 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 26

In article  <1991Feb16.235050.8231@rice.edu> Preston Briggs writes:
]hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
]
]>What is needed in addition is a language which allows
]>the introduction of operator syntax according to the
]>user's desires.
]
]This is a hard thing.  People have been fooling with it for years
]and haven't gotten very useful results.  The Lisp community
](especially the Schemers) are probably the most advanced,
]but many people seem unwilling to accept the parentheses and other overhead.

I have to disagree.  I think the problem has been essentially solved
for Scheme and Lisp (with minor improvements still possible), given
that you are willing to put up with the syntax.  And for general
syntax the problem has been mostly solved by Prolog implementors, with
some minor caveats associated with finite look-ahead grammars.

You can't do it with (entirely) pre-compiled grammars like those
produced by yacc, but modern computer speeds make those superfluous.
Table-driven parsers with run-time modifiable tables are plenty fast
enough these days.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman