I am just wondering does C++ read the whole source file into one line inside of a stack? or does it read each individual line? Like this #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << "Hello World!!" << endl; return 0; } would it read this in like this #include <iostream>using namespace std;int main(){cout << "Hello World!!" << endl;return 0;} Or just like this: #include <iostream> // link code here... after linkage now using namespace std; // validate this line // skip white space int main() // validate this line { // read in start block character cout << "Hello World!!" << endl; // validate this line return 0; // read in this line } // read in end block character

I'm not an expert but I'll try to explain it the best I can =)

It's a bit more complicated then that. The entire source code is first broken down into a list of tokens. So the list might go something like this-


int
main
(
)
{
cout
<<
"Hello World!!"
<<
endl
;
return
0
;
}


The #include <iosream> is a preprocessor directive and should be handled before tokenizeing I believe.

The syntex is is then checked using a parser that runs through each token and makes sure it's a valid syntex/grammar. If the syntax is valid it builds a parse tree which is then converted into assembly. The assembly is then translated into byte code (in interpreted languages like java/c#) or machine language/binary.

There are different types of parseing techniques but one called Recursive Descent is one of the more popular.

Above is a *very* non-descriptive explanation of how it works to get you started on your journey. You'll want to look into these topics: compiler theory, context-free grammars, recursive descent parsers, syntax/parse trees.

It may help if you look into or have some background in computational theory whcih is taught at a lot of schools. The end of that class (for me at least) lead right into compiler theory.

Good luck!

Well i was just interested since i am currently building my own recursive-descent parser [smile] and am having trouble with finding a solution to validating if, for, else statments. The way the parser is now it is soposed to read one line of code from the file then validate it then store the data or output the results. But if it is an if statment i would need to get another line of code from the file agian and agian and agian untill i reach my end statment but i can't figure out how i will do this. Since my compiler calls functions within itself it would just start fresh and read a new line and it wouldn't know if it was looking for a end statment or not. Can anyone give me any ideas on how to achive this?

So the program is read line by line then?

In my book it said that C++ dosn't know what new-lines are so that made me think does it read all the statments onto one single line inside a buffer for valiadtion.

Quote:Original post by GameMasterXL
Well i was just interested since i am currently building my own recursive-descent parser [smile] and am having trouble with finding a solution to validating if, for, else statments. The way the parser is now it is soposed to read one line of code from the file then validate it then store the data or output the results.

But that's not how a true recursive-descent parser works. A recursive descent parser will read a token at a time, not a line at a time.

Usually how it works is that it tries to build the syntax tree as it reads in individual lexemes. The parser requests lexemes from the lexer independent of the amount of whitespace in between the lines. For an if/else construct (ignoring comments), what probably happens is that it sees the if, asks for the next lexeme and if the lexeme is not a ( then it errors out. Then it jumps into a parse expression mode, and parses the expression inside the ()s, grabs the next ) and then asks for another lexeme. If the lexeme is a { then it jumps into a block parsing mode, if the lexeme is anything else, it tries to parse it as a statement.