Re: Proposal to change definition of 'name' (forbid final .)

On 30.11.2023 14:59, Norm Tovey-Walsh wrote:
> I imagine it was something like, “if you see a name that ends in ‘.’
> followed by a space, you can’t know if that’s the ‘.’ that ends the rule
> until you look ahead an unbounded distance.” I guess that forbidding ‘.’
> at the end of the name would resolve that, but would it introduce
> different unbounded lookahead problems?

I would agree that it solves the problem that you describe, and I can't
see any newly introduced problems resulting from that change.

The required whitespace comes to help with reducing the lookahead for
completing the name. From an LL perspective, it makes the construct
LL(2) at best: when seeing both '.' and a whitespace char, a name that
precedes it can be completed.

I was wondering whether there was the idea to lift the requirement for
that whitespace, but I guess everyone is aware that this would cause a
real ambiguity, even when '.' cannot be the final name char.

Gunther

Received on Thursday, 30 November 2023 14:40:03 UTC