[antlr-interest] Review of "Language Implementation Patterns"

Brian Lavender brian at brie.com
Fri Jul 30 19:01:42 PDT 2010


Well, in todays culture of vulnerabilities, correctness is becoming key and 
grammars are certainly a good way to implement correctness. Even though
Bertrand Meyer will say that verified correctness isn't the end all solution,
I think its relevance can not be underestimated. 

Perhaps the reviewer should go back to the day of Djikstra, Hoare,
and Dahl and watch his job mess up the computer. I didn't work much
with computers in the day of Job Control, but from reading literature,
correctness seemed to be key as I can imagine that a crashed job could
really muck things up.

I think we will have achieved a great accomplishment when coders joke with
one another "Show me your grammar!". Certainly, ANTLR helps bring grammars
to the masses and from attending a part of "Emerging Languages" group at
OSCON, I can see many exiting things coming out of language development and
I hope to get better at it. 

I bought the book too. I have only scanned through it. I will be working
through it. I think that the one thing that I would like is more
cookbook routines, nothing like an example to illustrate.

I am also very excited about SCALA and Erlang. It seems that their pattern
matching and tail end recursion go right along with grammar design.

I'll just end with.

What is 127 + 1?

negative 128 silly!!! Call me crazy, but I saw this problem just today. 
Check this code snippet!

int validChar(char testChar)
{
  if (testChar < 6) {
     return -1;
  } 
  return 1;
}

brian

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 10:51:29AM -0700, Terence Parr wrote:
> http://www.i-programmer.info/bookreviews/20-theory/1097-language-implementation-patterns.html
> 
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture


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