[mattfenwick]

Wait a second. Please don't misrepresent what I'm saying. I never said anything about "get[ting] bogged down trying to get the lexer/parser to work". I never mentioned a full-blown language/compiler.

I'm genuinely interested by your comment. If I'm interpreting it correctly, you seem to be claiming that ensuring corner cases are handled correctly, testing, and maintaining a parser require a trivially small amount of work. What do you use to build your parsers?

[WalterBright]

> What do you use to build your parsers?

I use a text editor.

Using a coverage analyzer is adequate for evaluating the thoroughness of the tests.

Yes, it all is a trivially small amount of work compared to the rest of a language project (and even compared with the rest of the compiler). You'll spend much more time just trying to figure out how to convert floating point values to strings.

[haberman]

> You'll spend much more time just trying to figure out how to convert floating point values to strings.

I should hope not, since the source code to printf() should have pretty much the complete answer to that!

[WalterBright]

It may not have a license that is compatible with your needs.

And yes, I did have to do my own float => string implementation.

[mattfenwick]

Just to clarify: I'm asking what strategy/approach you use -- hand-written vs. generator, bottom-up vs. top-down, backtracking, ambiguous, context-sensitive, semantic actions, etc. Sorry for the confusion.