A STORY WITH A MORAL
I have just had the sad experience of writing a parser for Autocad
Data eXchange Format (DXF) files. This format was designed to be read
by Fortran programs. It has some odd properties.
Has anyone else met a language where certain lexemes must contain a
newline charcter?
Has anyone else written a parser that should (and does) accept tokens in any order -
yes, *any* order - but must preserve the given order?
Has anyone else parsed an Autocad DXF file?
And the moral? Just a question really - why do people design languages like that?
P.S. It is possible that I misunderstood the specification in the Autocad manual.
It was written in Sweedish, which is barely comprehensible to a reader of
German.
P.P.S. There is probably another moral there!
|