Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Good error reporting gets really tricky with generated parsers. That said, it can be a nice time saver for smaller things like DSLs and languages early on.

Even then, yacc and bison are pretty solid overall. I believe Postgres still uses a yacc grammar today, as another high profile example. I'd arguebthr parsing of SQL is one or the least interesting thi.gs an RDBMS does, though.






To reinforce your point on good error reporting, though, SQL errors are notoriously unhelpful.

"Yeah there's an unbalanced parentheses...somewhere near this point... might actually be unbalanced, or you missed a comma or semicolon. You tell me."




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: