Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them?

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From	gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu>
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Subject	Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them?
Date	Thu, 9 Jun 2022 23:01:04 -0700 (PDT)
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On Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 9:50:50 AM UTC-7, Roger L Costello wrote:

> Page 84-85 of the dragon book [1] says:

> There are several reasons for separating the analysis phase of compiling into
> lexical analysis and parsing.

OK, no-one else has said it yet, so I will.

With small memories and slow computers 70 or 60 years ago, the time
and space were important.

Then we had microcomputers, where we had to relearn everything learned
on mainframes years before, so that was 50 or 40 years ago.

But by 30 or 20 years ago, memories were big and computers fast.
While programs needing compiling have also gotten larger, I am not
convinced that either speed or size is much of a problem now.

The separation of tasks, modular programming, often makes sense,
so it is likely still reasonable to keep them separate.  But I don't
believe because of space or size.

(Well, maybe running compilers on an Arduino Nano still have
a size or space limit.  But most don't do that.)

There is still the old saying:

"premature optimization is the root of all evil"

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Thread

The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-06-09 14:52 +0000
  Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? "Alexei A. Frounze" <alexfrunews@gmail.com> - 2022-06-09 18:07 -0700
  Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-06-09 23:01 -0700
  Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-06-10 12:26 +0200
  The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-06-11 23:45 +0300
  Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2022-06-11 18:15 -0400
    Re: The dragon book says separating lexical analysis and parsing is beneficial, so why doesn't ANTLR separate them? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-06-12 14:10 +0000

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