c parser wanted

Dan DeVries ddv at Solbourne.COM
Thu Apr 27 11:47:25 AEST 1989


In article <7974 at june.cs.washington.edu> franz at cs.washington.edu (Franz G. Amador) writes:
>Does anyone have or know of source for a parser/pretty-printer for c
>that reads in the c and just spits it back out?  I'd much prefer that
>it be based upon a nice yacc grammar than it be hand-coded, which is
>why I'd rather not use the source for Unix's indent command.
>

To write a pretty printer that completely syntax checks C is horribly
wasteful.  Only certain constructs cause indentation and that is all thea
a pretty printer should recognize.  This is important because a pretty printer
is an excellent debug tool when the C parser doesn't help. (i.e. where did
I leave out that } ).  The last pretty printer I wrote took 4 hours and
only recognized { } for while if repeat and a few others.

Forget Yacc.  The source for yacc would be MUCH more complicated than a 
simple scanner required for prettyPrint.

(I know, flame away.  I just think that Yacc has it's place and its not
 for every job)



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