Post #1864452
2026-04-21 20:23 UTC
But the smart alec completely missed what I ACTUALLY would have done.
That is, I would have broken the subroutine in natural, smaller pieces.
I did this with the Pratt parser in my compiler, yesterday. I said to myself, ‘This is getting to be a mess of checks for errors. And there is no exception mechanism in C, it has no proper tail call, and I WILL NOT use goto.’ So I looked carefully and broke the Pratt parser into a natural set of subfunctions.
It takes practice, but it is worth it.
Replies (1)
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@chemoelectric@masto.ai 2026-04-21 20:25
Having exceptions, proper tail calls, or gotos wouldn’t alone have solved the problem, anyway. There still would have had to have been some kind of modularization.