MultiLineCommentChars and PostAsteriskCommentChars productions

Darien Valentine valentinium at gmail.com
Sun Apr 9 21:13:34 UTC 2017


I am curious about this lexical production, because if I understand
correctly, it seems to imply either backtracking or a lookahead that isn’t
made explicit.

```
MultiLineComment ::
  /* MultiLineCommentChars[opt] */

MultiLineCommentChars ::
  MultiLineNotAsteriskChar MultiLineCommentChars[opt]
  * PostAsteriskCommentChars[opt]

PostAsteriskCommentChars ::
  MultiLineNotForwardSlashOrAsteriskChar MultiLineCommentChars[opt]
  * PostAsteriskCommentChars[opt]

MultiLineNotAsteriskChar ::
  SourceCharacterbut not *

MultiLineNotForwardSlashOrAsteriskChar ::
  SourceCharacterbut not one of / or *
```

In the second choices within PostAsteriskCommentChars and
MultiLineCommentChars, the appearance of PostAsteriskCommentChars following
the literal asterisk is optional. Because of this, a naive match will be
made for PostAsteriskCommentChars against the `*` of a terminal `*/` of the
MultiLineComment.

While this is not ultimately ambiguous because, having made that match, the
next attempt will fail and we can backtrack one step to find another way
out; or, more realistically, an implementation would look ahead at whether
the next character (after "*") is `/` before deciding that
PostAsteriskCommentChars/2 should _really_ be matched. However it seems
unusual that the grammar is written this way since elsewhere the grammar
seems to carefully avoid implied backtracking, and lookaheads are rare and
explicit.

This section of the lexical grammar has remained unchanged since ES1, so it
may be that it just hasn’t been revisited as the grammar specification
style developed. Am I reading it correctly and, if so, is it actually
unusual, or does this sort of thing fall within the boundaries of how the
grammar is normally described?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/attachments/20170409/6bd396f4/attachment.html>


More information about the es-discuss mailing list