Syntax Directed Editors for C

[jim at haring.UUCP]

At the Spring '84 EUUG conference in Nijmegen, The Netherlands,
Theo de Ridder from IHBO "de Maere" in Enschede (...mcvax!im60!ridder)
presented a paper

	"Automatic Generation of Syntax Directed Screen Editors"

	Abstract:
	From a new effective and automatic error-recovery
	scheme for LALR(1)-parsers a program generator is
	developed that produces a syntax directed screen editor
	for any language specification written in LEX and YAAC.

The paper says they were working on a specification for C. It also
says the size of 85% of the compiled editor code is ~55K bytes, a
long way from 2M bytes.

As an aside, when trying to write a specification for the Bourne Shell,
Theo discovered all those wonderful loopholes like
	<<`echo "Goodbye World"`
which cause hours of endless amusement at conference exhibitions.
(One machine we tried it on had to be restored from floppies).

Jim McKie    Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam    mcvax!jim