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Does APL really need run‐time parsing?
Author(s) -
Strawn George O.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380070207
Subject(s) - parsing , computer science , programming language , statement (logic) , identifier , top down parsing , bottom up parsing , linguistics , philosophy
Most APL systems delay all parsing until run‐time. Because the APL expression language is inherently ambiguous and because identifier binding is delayed until run‐time, some runtime parsing is shown to be necessary. Nevertheless we argue that most APL statement parsing can be done at entry‐time and that there are several reasons for doing so. Then a technique is described whereby APL statements are partially parsed at entry‐time and are parse completed at run‐time.