From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2016 14:15:29 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Comments on "C"
In-Reply-To: <20160908133038.CF61818C0CB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20160908133038.CF61818C0CB@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <5ebf745233cd51fbdbe56a4faf2216b3@mhorton.net>

When I was at Berkeley working on my dissertation, I wrote a tool that 
would let you edit a text file written in any language you could define 
with a grammar, with syntax and semantic error checking while you 
edited.  I had grammars for several popular (in 1980) languages.  The 
only one I couldn't properly create a grammar for was C.

There were two problems:
1) typedef, which lets you create new words with syntax implications, 
and
2) the preprocessor, which lets you get into all kinds of syntax trouble

   Mary Ann