Re: gnubol: A question

[Randall Bart <Barticus@att.net>]

At 04:44 PM 11/1/99 , Michael McKernan wrote:
>for Randall Bart or whomever might have a defensible opinion.

Am I supposed to be flattered (I'm the person you ask for by name) or 
insulted (you think my opinions are indefensible).  B^)

>I'm looking at how we might resolve the syntactic ambiguity of
>abbreviated conditionals and condition names at parse time rather
>than later in he compilation.

I think the compilers I worked on parsed the expression as though the 
abbreviated conditions were booleans and unary operators, then fixed up the 
expression in the back end.

>If I encounter the following
>         IF a = b OR ( c < d AND e < f ) OR g
>and "g" is indeed a simple variable, should I interpret this to mean
>         IF a = b OR ( c < d AND e < f ) OR e < g

Correct, odd as it seems.

Whoever writes this code should pay attention the demands of COBOL-20XX 
with BOOLEAN fields.  BOOLEAN means bit field; what is called boolean in 
other languages is called conditional.  However, single bit BOOLEANs are 
interpreted as conditionals.  If g is a single bit BOOLEAN, then it's a 
conditional and there is no abbreviated condition.  If a is a BOOLEAN 
(single or multi-bit) then it can't be an abbreviated condition, so it's a 
syntax error if g isn't a conditional or one bit BOOLEAN.

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