On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 04:41:34PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > Okay, here's a question for those of you with more experience at parsers > than I have. (Which would be about everyone) > > Is there any reasonable case where we would need to backtrack over > successfully parsed source and redo the parsing? I'm not talking about the > case where regular expressions run over text and ultimately fail, but > rather cases where we need to chuck out part of what we have and restart? Disclaimer: I'm not sure whether you're asking about lexing, tokenizing, both, or neither. In current perl, we do something _like_ that to disambiguate certain situations. Grep the sources for `expectation'. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this also goes on with, e.g., multi-line regexen. Oh, you said `reasonable'. Peace, * Kurt Starsinic (kstar@sri.net) ---------------- Senior Software Architect * | `It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems | | into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases | | this is a bad idea.' - Ross Callon |Thread Previous | Thread Next