Comment by MaxBarraclough
6 years ago
ibains made a specific point about language processing in IDEs being different to that of (traditional) compilers. Presumably there exists a state-of-the-art there just as there's a state-of-the-art for conventional compilers, but academia doesn't give it as much attention.
Which is still countered by:
2. Cross sectional variation. There's no such thing as "what industry wants". Every place wants something different, with only a small subset common to 80% of employers.
No?
I don't think that really holds up. Ultimately you could say this about any small mismatch between desired skill-sets and those available, but at some point we call it hair-splitting.
If you need someone to build a parser for your IDE, you're presumably better off with an expert in traditional compilers, than with someone who knows nothing at all of language processing. You'd be better off still with someone experienced in language processing within IDEs. Less mismatch is better, even if it's impractical to insist on no mismatch at all.
Text -> parser -> AST -> job done. If it's any different in an IDE vs anything else I'd like to know how.
Your IDE parser will be unusable if it goes bananas while you're typing the characters needed to get from one fully, correctly parseable state to the next.
It needs to be able to handle:
and also:
and also:
It also needs to be able to autocomplete function signatures that exist below the current line being edited, so the parser can't simply bail out as soon as it reaches the first incomplete or incorrect line.
Isn't that pretty standard for a parser? When was the last time a compiler bailed on the very first error it hit and refused to do anything else?
The solution is to pick synchronisation points to start parsing again, i.e. ; at the end of a statement or } at the end of a block.
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Partial parse state and recovery are critical. You don't want the entire bottom half of a file to lose semantic analysis while the programmer figures out what to put before a closing ).
Does that issue go away if you use packrat vs some other means?
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