In the past year I worked on various grammars where first/rest or
head/tail were used as labels for parts of lists. I found I associate
head/tail with a list immediately, while in case of first/rest I have to
"parse" grammar rules for a while before understanding their structure.
Moreover, I tend to assume that rest is a list of the same thigs as
first, but I don't have such assumption in case of head/tail. This
assumption was in conflict with the grammar structure.
I'm not sure how much these observations are applicable to others, but I
decided to act on them and switch from first/rest to head/tail.
In the past year I worked on various grammars where first/rest or
head/tail were used as labels for parts of lists. I found I associate
head/tail with a list immediately, while in case of first/rest I have to
"parse" grammar rules for a while before understanding their structure.
Moreover, I tend to assume that rest is a list of the same thigs as
first, but I don't have such assumption in case of head/tail. This
assumption was in conflict with the grammar structure.
I'm not sure how much these observations are applicable to others, but I
decided to act on them and switch from first/rest to head/tail.
The arithmetics example grammar is the first thing everyone sees in the
online editor at the PEG.js website, but it begins with a complicated
|combine| function in the initializer. Without understanding it it is
impossible to understand code in the actions. This may be a barrier to
learning how PEG.js works.
This commit removes the |combine| function and gets rid of the whole
initializer, removing the learning obstacle and streamlining action
code. The only cost is a slight code duplication.
The |found| property wasn't very useful as it mostly contained just one
character or |null| (the exception being syntax errors triggered by
|error| or |expected|). Similarly, the "but XXX found" part of the error
message (based on the |found| property) wasn't much useful and was
redundant in presence of location info.
For these reasons, this commit removes the |found| property and
corresponding part of the error message from syntax errors. It also
modifies error location info slightly to cover a range of 0 characters,
not 1 character (except when the error is triggered by |error| or
|expected|). This corresponds more precisely to the actual situation.
Fixes#372.
Report left recursion also in cases where the recursive rule invocation
is not a direct element of a sequence, but is wrapped inside an
expression.
Fixes#359.
Before this commit, the |reportLeftRecursion| pass was written in
functional style, passing the |visitedRules| array around as a parameter
and making a new copy each time a rule was visited. This apparently
caused performance problems in some deeply recursive grammars.
This commit makes it so that there is just one array which is shared
across all the visitor functions via a closure and modified as rules are
visited.
I don't like losing the functional style (it was elegant) but
performance is more important.
Fixes#203.
The |util.puts| and |util.error| functions are deprecated in Node.js
0.12.x.
Based on a pull request by Jan Stránský (@burningtree):
https://github.com/pegjs/pegjs/pull/334
Add missing |named| case to the visitor in lib/compiler/asts.js, which
makes the infinite loop and left recursion detectors work correctly with
named rules.
The missing case caused |make parser| to fail with:
140:34: Infinite loop detected.
make: *** [parser] Error 1
