From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Proliferation of Reserved Words Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:40:50 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: <87bl8qf2wt.fsf@nightsong.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="1bbd9652005230ee90f94b8d950008c2"; logging-data="19203"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19l2bHyEgm5wn05v5+PdhWg" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.1 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:Jr5iD/sTKo7KiDAkVjdhtrBGI6c= sha1:jS4D3/stdMXmirf+lUJQd93zPdw= Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:62072 List-Id: "Randy Brukardt" writes: > At least twice it was proposed that Ada have "keywords", identifiers with > special meaning in the syntax but that were not reserved. I remember this as a fundamental decision of PL/I that made PL/I quite hard to parse using the automata-based methods developed not long afterwards. I don't know what consequences that had for PL/I or anything else, if any. But I think it was retrospectively considered a mistake. It's a lot easier to separate parsing and scanning if you can have reserved words. OTOH I know that C compilers sometimes (usually?) handle typedefs by having the parser tell the scanner to treat the typedef name as keyword-like, after it sees that a typedef has been defined.