[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[Douglas McIlroy]

> everyone should write for their first compiler in Pascal for a
> simple language and no cheating using YACC.  You need to write the whole
> thing if you want to understand how parsing really works.

Yacc certainly makes it easier to write parsers for big grammars, but
it's far from cheating. You need to know a lot more about parsing to use
Yacc than you need to roll your own.

Hand parsing of a tiny grammar is almost a  necessary step on the way to
understanding Yacc. But I think hand-building the whole parser for a
compiler is unnecessary torture--like doing trigonometry with log tables.

Doug
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