Hacker News Reader

Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

Well, that's a trade-off, as most things in the parser design. You can go the way of the compilers of the yore and report only the line numbers. Or you can maintain column numbers only for a single line, everything in the previous lines will get only a line number. Or you can store the column numbers in the tokens which works better if you lexer emits them one at a time and the parser is fine with that.

View on HN

If you save the offset (and you are, if you use a borrowed string) you can retrieve the original source code by re-reading the input file on the fly. This is expensive (due to IO, but especially also since you need to re-lex and recompute all offsets up to the point of the error), but it only needs to happen in case a parse error is generated, so the cost is likely negligible.

I’ve done this in a parser where I wanted to avoid storing line and column numbers instead of a single byte offset, but still wanted to provide the more user-friendly line and column numbers in the error message.

Storing column numbers for every token just in case there might be an error likely weighs out the string allocation reduction. But for error messages it might suffice to output just the line number together with a snippet of the line at the error location. Most people probably don't care about the exact column number, though it might be bad for other tools.

> Storing column numbers for every token just in case there might be an error likely weighs out the string allocation reduction.

Only if you store all of the tokens before starting the parsing, which would arguably be the bigger fish to fry in terms of conserving memory.

But it actually slows down the lexer: by an insignificant amount if the lexer is the traditionally written one, or by quite a lot if it's one of those new-fangled ones that use SIMD-instructions speed up finding the token boundaries... but such lexers also benefit wrom the ability to re-use unneeded parts of the source input (like quotes or spaces) for storing auxillary data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com