TAS Must Die, Chapter 15

While spelunking with Iscript syntax, I noticed that the expression on an IF statement is fairly robust with logicals and parentheses. Once you can have nested parentheses, you have to support a stack of some sort or you just can't parse it properly. I did the expression parsing in P1 using a recusrive descent parser. I wasn't in the mood to remove the left recursion from Iscript's more complex conditional statements so I decided to implement an operator precedence parser.

The typical OPP, as per the link, includes a table of precedences. This tells you if 1+3*5 should be treated as (1+3)*5 or 1+(3*5).

I've done a few prototypes now to refresh my memory. It occured to me that I was implementing an algorithm in java using the exact same architecture I used many years ago in c. And it was clunky. So I scrapped it - I decided that the table of precedences just doesn't work as well in java as it does in C.

I'll likely replace the traditional grid with a class that is initialized with Token-on-stack and Token-on-input pairs. Each pair will resolve to a ParserAction class which guides the parser. Java doesn't have a very nice initialization mechanism so it will be annoying. But the part that does the actual parsing will be lean.