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.
This is a complete rewrite of the arithmetics example grammar. It now
allows whitespace between tokens, supports "-" and "/" operators, and
gets the operator associativity right. Also, rule names now match the usual
conventions (term, factor,...).
Beside this, the rewrite reflects how I write grammars today (as opposed
to few years ago) and what style I would recommend to others.
Labeled expressions lead to more maintainable code and also will allow
certain optimizations (we can ignore results of expressions not passed
to the actions).
This does not speed up the benchmark suite execution statistically
significantly on V8.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals):
---------------------------------
Test # Before After
---------------------------------
1 28.43 kB/s 28.46 kB/s
2 28.38 kB/s 28.56 kB/s
3 28.22 kB/s 28.58 kB/s
4 28.76 kB/s 28.55 kB/s
5 28.57 kB/s 28.48 kB/s
---------------------------------
Average 28.47 kB/s 28.53 kB/s
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I'll introduce labelled expressions shortly and I want to use ":" as a
label-expression separator. This change avoids conflict between the two
meanings of ":". (What would e.g. "foo: 'bar'" mean? Rule "foo"
matching string "bar", or string "bar" labelled "foo"?)
David Majda
chunpu
David Majda