Re: Elk/Guile (Re: Bad news from the module/environment front)

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@free-expression.org>]

On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Chris Bitmead wrote:
> When I think of all the syntax of C, what with operator precedance,
> structures, pointers, type promotion and all it sounds way way harder to
> me.
> 
    It all depends on how the course assignment is structured and what the
prof decides to leave out.  The types in C can be treated in a pretty
simple way, especially if you leave out floating point #'s and maybe some
modifiers (like long, unsigned).  If you restricted the compiler to
dealing with int, char, pointers, structs, and unions, I don't believe you
would have too much difficulty.  Especially if you don't care about
optimizing data layout or what have you.  All that stuff is details that
aren't really important for learning what compilation is or how to do it.
  Operator precedence would be handled by a parser generator that dealt
with precedence (like bison) - once you've got the syntax tree, it's
irrelevant.

Lynn