Yes, to some extend.
> Can you assume that * X is a pointer dereference?
[Aside: The C declaration syntax is particularly terrible. In a declaration 'star' means "address of", elsewhere it means "dereference". https://books.google.de/books?id=bXGhBAAAQBAJ&printsec=front...]
> I can't think of any language in which I can extract any substring of a sentence that could be a syntactic unit on its own, and correctly understand its meaning without knowing the rest of the sentence.
Well, most languages have expressions/statements that roughly correspond to source lines. When I read a line of python like this:
self.raw_requestline = self.rfile.readline(65537)
I can be 100% sure that:
- `self` is an object with an attribute rfile
- `=` is the assignment operator
- there is a method `readline` that get's called with an integer argument 65537.
All this without checking any enclosing socpes.
A random line of lisp:
(setcdr current (list :args (cdr current)))
could mean anything depending on the enclosing scopes. Pretty sure setcdr,list,cdr are function calls but who knows. You don't have enough information to decide this from the snippet provided.