Like in my other comment, I agree with this. I missed mentioning mentioning my assumption of a forceful shift or reduce action in case of an ambiguous grammar.
Not a fan of handling it that way. Shift-reduce conflicts don't correspond to people's intuitive understanding of the grammar because good shift-reduce parser tables are highly non-local as they're constructed from fixed-point dataflow iteration over the whole grammar. It's not like top-down parsing where it's easy to understand the compromise of making a non-backtrackable decision based on k-token lookahead. If you force them to manually resolve shift-reduce conflicts in the grammar, it's likely they will be surprised by what happens, and not in a good way.
Yes, it definitely isn't the right way to handle ambiguous grammars. My assumption was caused by extensive usage of YACC for writing parsers in the past. To avoid it's default action, generally ambiguous grammars are avoided (since it is used only to write programming language parsers anyway)
psykotic|11 years ago
nachivpn|11 years ago