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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!mcvax!guido
From: guido@mcvax.cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Rebuttal to Mr. Russell Nelson's complaint about SPL
Message-ID: <7382@boring.mcvax.cwi.nl>
Date: Tue, 12-May-87 08:49:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.7382
Posted: Tue May 12 08:49:07 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 15-May-87 01:42:01 EDT
References: <224@helm.UUCP> <3997@teddy.UUCP> <7374@boring.mcvax.cwi.nl> <193@tg.UUCP>
Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Organization: "Stamp Out BASIC" Committee, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 24
Summary: ratfor is a preprocessor
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.ibm.pc:3975 comp.lang.misc:387

In article <7374@boring.mcvax.cwi.nl> I wrote:
>>	A translator does *full* lexical and syntactical analysis, while a
>>	preprocessor leaves part of this kind of checking to the processor
>>	(compiler/interpreter/...) of its output language.

In article <193@tg.UUCP> scott@tg.UUCP (Scott Barman) writes:
>This sounds pretty much what Ratfor does, especially the versions from the
>Software Tools Users Group.  If this is true, then why is Ratfor still called
>a preprocessor?

Ratfor (at least the version that comes with 4.3BSD Unix) doesn't care
very much about the contents of simple statements.  It checks for
matching parentheses, but not much more, leaving lots of error checking
to the f77 compiler.  You can feed it with complete nonsense without
getting any errors from ratfor.  Thus, this ratfor is definitely a
preprocessor, not a complete translator.

I don't know about the version of the Software Tools Users Group; does
it check the syntax of F77 I/O statements, for example?  Maybe it is
still called a preprocessor because it grew out of one (the original
from Bell Labs).
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@cwi.nl or mcvax!guido or (from ARPAnet) guido%cwi.nl@seismo.css.gov