Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!gt-eedsp!baud
From: baud@gt-eedsp.UUCP (Kurt Baudendistel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ considered disenchanting
Message-ID: <535@gt-eedsp.UUCP>
Date: 19 Oct 88 16:04:09 GMT
References: <2010@cs.Buffalo.EDU> <3006@mulga.oz>
Reply-To: baud@gt-eedsp.UUCP (Kurt Baudendistel)
Organization: School of Electrical Engineering, Ga. Tech, Atlanta, GA  30332
Lines: 35

In article <3006@mulga.oz> ttey@mulga.oz (YEO Tee Thiam Eric) writes:
>It is so complex that it has been said that to parse C++ correctly,
>a recursive decent parser with an infinite look ahead and some
>heuristics is required (I believed it was mentioned in some
>documentation for GNU G++).

interestingly enough, the g++ documentation states that

	[t]he design of the C++ programming language did not take into
	account the usefulness of being able to specify that language using
	an LALR(1) grammar.  As a resut, in order to correctly parse it,
	one needs a look-ahead lexical analyzer (with infinite lookahead),
	and a recursive descent parser, guided by some good heuristics.

which supports this conjecture. however, the documentation goes on to state
that

	... in providing such a grammar [LALR(1) as g++ actually does],
	some syntactic forms were lost, most notably old-style C function
	declarations and occasionally function parameters which are
	declared longhand to be pointers to functions are not recognized
	properly.

the forms that need to be modified are standard c forms, but c++ was designed 
to be c compatible. there's the rub.

with all of this c++ bashing, what
is my alternative (realistically) for a programming langugage that provides
the c++ power of abstraction and the efficiency of c?

-- 
Kurt Baudendistel [GRA McClellan]
Georgia Tech, School of Electrical Engineering, Atlanta, GA  30332
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