Re: Early Programming Books

[Paul Koning via cctalk]

> On Jun 21, 2021, at 5:23 AM, ben via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> ...
> I want to transformatiom before full parsing expressions, as a text process.
> string "a+(b+c)*c" becomes "((b+c)*c)a+".

As an academic exercise that's pretty trivial.  But why would you want to do 
that?  Apparently some people think that this is how you create expression 
parsers, but that isn't actually a useful or necessary approach.  It's entirely 
trivial to do a sequential scan over the expression tokens and produce 
corresponding code, in one pass without backtracking or text manipulation.

BTW, on code generation: it's true that this is complex, and a still evolving 
field, if you consider optimization.  But a straightforward code generator fed 
by the parse tree isn't very hard, and requires no great magic.  I still have 
the one I wrote in compiler class back in 1976; it took a week of work and that 
included learning Pascal and linked lists.  

        paul