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From: kim@helios.enea.se (Kim Wald`n)
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: lexical scan, parsing
Message-ID: <KIM.90Jan5113441@helios.enea.se>
Date: 5 Jan 90 10:34:41 GMT
References: <801@tuewsd.lso.win.tue.nl>
Sender: kim@enea.se
Organization: Enea Data AB, Sweden
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In-reply-to: wsinpp@lso.win.tue.nl's message of 3 Jan 90 11:21:09 GMT

Try "The Eiffel Object-Oriented Parsing Library" by Philip Hucklesby and
Bertrand Meyer in proc. Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems
(TOOLS'89), pp. 501-507, Paris, France, Nov. 1989.

The article describes a library of classes for lexical analysis and parsing,
along with a tool, yoocc ("Yes! and Object-Oriented Compiler Compiler),
making it possible to generate parsers, where the syntactic and semantic parts
are cleanly separated.

Unlike other parser generators (notably yacc), it permits reusing the same 
syntactic analysis for different purposes like compiling, extracting for
documentation, pretty-printing etc., only adding new classes for different
semantic actions.

For most object-oriented languages, the complex inheritance structures needed
to achieve this flexibility prevents its use in production quality compilers,
due to bad performance.

In the strongly typed Eiffel language, it becomes feasible thanks to the 
efficient implementation of multiple inheritance and dynamic bindning.

-- Kim Walden
Enea Data, Sweden
kim@enea.se