goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) (05/28/91)
Could some compiler guru (or in fact anyone who knows something about the subject) perhaps explain just a few of the practical ramifications of using LALR-type parsers? What I'm wondering about is not so much performance, but rather things like - 1) What can't you do with LALR-parsable languages that you might conceivably want to do in a practical programming language? 2) In intuitive terms, how do LALR-parsable languages differ from languages that are parsable by other strategies as well, or that cannot be handled by LALR parsers (which gets us back to question 1)? Perhaps more to the point: Are there any books which discuss such mat- ters, and which are not simply long strings of pseudo-code, lemmas, and proofs? I found a book, _LR Parsing_, by Nigel Chapman, but this work has a very narrow scope. To its credit, it utilizes both mathematical and practical approaches. And it doesn't restrict itself to C (a la "parsing in C"). Still, it covers only LR(0) and LALR(1)-parser generators, and doesn't have much to say about the practical characteristics of languages which belong in these categories and how they compare to other context free languages. -- -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer