[erlang-patches] Scan "=<<" as something useful

[Anthony Ramine]

Hello Raimo,

If I read the documentation, I don't see anywhere where it is written that erl_scan is supposed to be greedy. Nor I see any syntax knowledge if we just say that erl_scan will avoid returning two consecutive comparison operators if it can. That is just knowledge that '=<' '<' makes no sense, and I can't think of any language where it does.

Erlang is and has always been pragmatic, letting such an embarrassing syntax wart for the sake of beauty isn't what should be done here, in my opinion. Pragmatism is what allows us to have a nice syntax for specs and callbacks; which wouldn't be possible without an ugly hack too[1].

What would break if that patch is accepted? The answer is nothing.

Regards,

[1] https://github.com/nox/otp/blob/master/lib/stdlib/src/erl_parse.yrl#L543-552

-- 
Anthony Ramine

Le 29 avr. 2013 à 11:18, Raimo Niskanen a écrit :

> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 10:53:42AM +0200, Raimo Niskanen wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 10:15:28PM +0200, Anthony Ramine wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I've noticed that Erlang/OTP own code tend to be space-free, e.g. {a,
>>> b} is rather written as {a,b}. Then there is the occasional Bin=
>>> <<42>> with a space because erl_scan will scans "=<<" as '=<','<'
>>> instead of '=','<<'. This patch teaches erl_scan how to not do that.
>>> 
>>> There is no backwards compatibility problem as '=<','<' can't appear
>>> in valid code.
>> 
>> When I tried to fix this years ago while rewriting the scanner just after
>> the binary syntax was introduced I got lecutured (I think by Robert)
>> that it was a bad change because it introduces syntax knowledge
>> into the scanner.
>> 
>> The scanner is today greedy so it collects as many characters as it
>> can into a valid token, and "=<" is a valid token.  When it is
>> followed by "<" that becomes a syntax error in the parser.
>> 
>> I kind of miss this argument this time around...
>> 
> 
> If I read your patch correctly you also fix this variant:
> 
>    B=<<<<1>>/binary,2>>.
> 
> which means the scanner reads an arbitrary number of "<" after
> "=<" and then based on if they are odd or even decides to be
> greedy or not, and that is really much and ugly syntax knowledge
> for a scanner...
> 
> I got a big NO for this change.
> 
>>> 
>>>        git fetch https://github.com/nox/otp.git disambiguate-equal-binary
>>> 
>>>        https://github.com/nox/otp/compare/disambiguate-equal-binary
>>>        https://github.com/nox/otp/compare/disambiguate-equal-binary.patch
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Anthony Ramine
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>> 
>> -- 
>> 
>> / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
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> 
> -- 
> 
> / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
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