December 2009
Intermediate to advanced
380 pages
9h 2m
English
Content preview from Language Implementation PatternsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Directing the Parse with Semantic Information
The parsers we’re working with in this book recognize context-free languages. A context-free language is a language whose constructs don’t depend on the presence of other constructs. Unfortunately, some programming languages have context-sensitive phrases. To handle context-sensitive phrases with a context-free parser, we have to predicate alternatives. In effect, a predicate is just a run-time boolean test that says when it’s OK to match an alternative. The predicates gate the associated alternatives in and out.
To see why we need predicates, let’s look at a context-sensitive phrase within a programming language. C++ is the traditional parsing punching bag, so let’s get our gloves on and limber up ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.