Kindle Notes & Highlights
Why program by hand in five days what you can spend twenty-five years of your life automating?
You Can’t Put Too Much Water into a Nuclear Reactor
A beautifully ambiguous statement. Does it mean you shouldn't put too much water into a nuclear reactor, or the more the better?
an ambiguous grammar is analogous to a programming bug.
parsers recognize grammatical structure in a token stream and lexers recognize grammatical structure in a character stream.
When we say that the parser doesn’t need to distinguish between certain lexical structures or doesn’t care about what’s inside a structure, we really mean that our application doesn’t care. Our application performs the same action or translation on those lexical structures.
This makes sense from an efficiency standpoint, but it directly contradicts the ethos of reusable grammars via recursive descent parses events which ANTLR4 spent so much time introducing.
Construction of our grammar begins at the coarsest level, as usual.
Nonetheless, we’ll wrap up here because we’ve covered the R grammatical structure itself.
But have we? Both this R example and the previous CSV example were oversimplified. Neither were complete specs as used in the real world.
