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The Jim Roskind C/C++ Grammar (robertelder.org)
93 points by signa11 on Feb 16, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


Hey I worked with Jim!

Fun story: a project we worked on together involved some Python and he suggested that he didn't really know Python. At some point I somehow noticed that he wrote the Python profiler (see the name at the top https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/2.7/Lib/profile.py ). When I asked him about it he made some comment about how he didn't really know the language but he needed a profiler at some point, the language didn't have one, so he just wrote it.


For another cool .y (YACC) and .l (Flex) setup, check out what Postgres uses to parse SQL queries:

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/backend...

Link to all files / README: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/tree/master/src/backend...


In today’s world it seems like this article should be a repo up on github. I had never really thought of github in terms of it’s archiving and historical preservation propertie. FTP if it hasn’t already is going the way of telnet, gopher and Usenet


I wouldn't count on github for those purposes. They are files hosted under unique accounts -- those accounts could just delete their repos. If there is a need to archive something, I always make my own archive as opposed to bookmarking a hosting site.


I uploaded the contents of the c++grammar2.0.tar.Z file to https://github.com/palotasb/c-grammar2.0.tar.Z


Looks like he's now a Distinguished Engineer at Amazon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-roskind-19520/


I worked with Jim at Netscape, and we overlapped at Google later too.

Fantastic, broadly, and intensely talented person.


I guess the "lexer hack" probably has something to do with the lexer refering back to the symbol table to disambiguate things like typecast and function calls? Ie T(x) and f(x). Certainly there are other ambiguities that this particular hack may not resolve?


Good point : there's no parser inside the lexer, like PHP ;-)




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