From: Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 22:12:07 +0000 (+0000)
Subject: Initial revision
X-Git-Tag: 1-2~112
X-Git-Url: http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=7ddb5957cea97b6abbe5355ac076253e2a74031b;p=cupl.git

Initial revision
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+.SA 1
+.TL "A Brief Tour of the CUPL Internals"
+.AF "Thyrsus Enterprises"
+.AU "Eric S. Raymond" ESR "\&\&22 South Warren Ave, Malvern PA 19355"
+.MT 4
+.nr Pt 1
+.P
+The CUPL implementation is built around YACC and LEX.  The rest is
+ANSI and POSIX-conformant C.
+.P
+The YACC grammar just builds a parse tree, which is passed to
+interpret() for interpretation.  This method requires that all
+programs are always small enough that the entire tree can be held
+in memory, but it has the advantage that front and back end are very
+well separated.  It is a winning strategy on virtual-memory systems.
+.P
+One hack that greatly simplifies the grammar productions is that the
+lexer actually returns parse tree nodes, even for atoms like
+identifiers, strings, and numbers.  In fact, the lexical analyzer even
+does label and variable name resolution with the same simple piece of
+code; each IDENTIFIER token is looked up in the identifier list when
+it's recognized, so the parse tree early becomes a DAG.  (The -v1 option
+causes the compiler to dump its parse tree for inspection.)
+.P
+Most of the smarts are in interpret() and its sub-functions.  Because
+array variables can be re-allocated, the internals have to use a
+dynamic vector/array type with its own indexing machinery.
+.P
+Note that much of this machinery is quite generic and could be re-used
+for other languages with little change.
+