Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!phri!marob!daveh
From: daveh@marob.MASA.COM (Dave Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: YACC and parser design help
Message-ID: <342@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 25 Jul 88 16:17:22 GMT
Reply-To: daveh@marob.UUCP (Dave Hammond)
Organization: 18th Street Construction Co NY NY
Lines: 47

Can anyone suggest "novice level" reading material on the subjects:

	1. Command parser design and implementation
	2. YACC usage as it relates to #1 above.

I am involved with a project which currently does command parsing in a
brute-force manner (i.e. "if getchar is a begin-token then read till the
end-token, but lookout for comment lines along the way. Then do something
with the stuff between begin- and end-tokens").

I'm quite sure that with a better understanding of parser design I could do
this more efficiently. Also, perhaps YACC could do the trick for me, if I
knew how to make YACC do what I want.

Should it relate to the above, the syntax which I am attempting to parse is:

	a. "procedures" consist of a name and a curly-brace surrounded
	   set of statements.
	b. "statements" consist of a keyword, an optional set of comma
	   separated arguments, and a terminating semi-colon.
	c. multi-word arguments must be surrounded with quotes.
	d. comment lines may appear within (or between) procedures.

	example:
	# comment line
	procedure {
		keyword, arg1, arg2, "arg 3" ;
		# comment line
		keyword;
		}

	This is a bit simplified. For example, It would be helpful to
	differentiate between "statement" and 'statement', check for
	assignment operators (arg=text), etc.

Any pointers to appropriate reading materials, or suggestions for YACC
implementation of the above syntax would be appreciated.

Please e-mail responses. Thanks in advance.

Dave Hammond
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