Post #4317116
2026-07-15 02:43 UTC
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social
Oh p4 is another language which does not take into account non ascii identifiers into account. It was never even brought up as a problem.
The main reason why many of these languages do that is because they depend on flex rather than hand written lexers.
Replies (1)
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@pinskia@hachyderm.io 2026-07-15 03:02
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social The weird thing i saw about p4 is the developers were like we like our bison/flex parser/lexer. As someone wrote their parser and lexer for p4 I was super confused why they like it. The lexing nor the parsing part was the big issue with p4 but rather the semantics were not always fully defined. Especially their type matching for function calls. They left it up for implemented defined there. Especially with generics being included. It was fun to implement and get similar semantics and even prove the semantics and implementations dont line up.