<deleting everything related to Greg's non-sensical argument thread>

>And in any case, rewrites have their place. What I actually said was: "don't
>replace SW that has been tested for years with _casual_ rewrites", emphasis
>added.
>
>I also object to the apparent assumption that yacc is better. I have done
>big projects in yacc and recursive descent. I wrote a C parser in yacc, I
>did a dBASE III compiler for Ashton-Tate in yacc. I wrote the Green Hills
>assemblers, except for 68k, and did them RD. I did lots of other parsers.
>In the end, I decided that recursive descent was faster to write, had far
>fewer wierd and subtle bugs, and was easier to maintain. (Things that people
>just assume are true about yacc. Go figure.) If you don't program very
>fast, yacc is needed, but otherwise yacc is just a choice, not an advantage.
>

Having just fixed the code for expr I have to definitly agree here. The yacc
code is small in this case so fixing it was simple enough (knowing basic
parser concepts and precendence rules helps if you're gonna use yacc), but
patching a large grammer file would have been a lot nastier.

James