yacc was a major breakthrough. For the first time, automatic generation of of efficient, production-quality parsers was possible for languages of practical interest. Yacc-generated parsers had reasonable memory footprints. They ran in linear time.

But error reporting was overlooked. Then as no…

The Good, the Bad and The Ugly

feel a bit like Lee Van Cleef in an old spaghetti Western. Cast alongside Clint Eastwood, Van Cleef watched with great concern as one attempt after another was made on Eastwood's life. Van Cleef didn't mind Eastwood getting killed -- he just wanted to be the one to do it.

As some of you will have recognized, I am talki…

Thanks to cpantesters I'm doing something that amazes me -- of different systems. This is a stern test of my ability to write portable C code, and, in general I'm quite pleased with how I've done. So far only one mistake can clearly be laid at my door.

That mistake doesn't put me in a good light -- mistakes seldom do. But we learn more from mistakes than from successes. In this case, the mistake exposes a habit of mine that programmers of the modern school will find a bit lunatic. And perhaps it will give me a good way to point out …