1.1. The Cradle

1.1. The Cradle
	Chapter 1. Introduction

Every program needs some boiler plate … I/O routines, error message routines, etc. The programs we develop here will be no exceptions. I've tried to hold this stuff to an absolute minimum, however, so that we can concentrate on the important stuff without losing it among the trees. The code given below represents about the minimum that we need to get anything done. It consists of some I/O routines, an error-handling routine and a skeleton, null main program. I call it our cradle. As we develop other routines, we'll add them to the cradle, and add the calls to them as we need to. Make a copy of the cradle and save it, because we'll be using it more than once.

There are many different ways to organize the scanning activities of a parser. In Unix systems, authors tend to use getc and ungetc. I've had very good luck with the approach shown here, which is to use a single, global, lookahead character. Part of the initialization procedure (the only part, so far!) serves to “prime the pump” by reading the first character from the input stream. No other special techniques are required with Turbo 4.0 … each successive call to GetChar will read the next character in the stream.

Example 1.1. Cradle

program Cradle;

{ Constant Declarations }
const TAB = ^I;

{ Variable Declarations }
var Look: char;              { Lookahead Character }
                              
{ Read New Character From Input Stream }
procedure GetChar;
begin
   Read(Look);
end;

{ Report an Error }
procedure Error(s: string);
begin
   WriteLn;
   WriteLn(^G, 'Error: ', s, '.');
end;

{ Report Error and Halt }
procedure Abort(s: string);
begin
   Error(s);
   Halt;
end;

{ Report What Was Expected }
procedure Expected(s: string);
begin
   Abort(s + ' Expected');
end;

{ Match a Specific Input Character }
procedure Match(x: char);
begin
   if Look = x then GetChar
   else Expected('''' + x + '''');
end;

{ Recognize an Alpha Character }
function IsAlpha(c: char): boolean;
begin
   IsAlpha := upcase(c) in ['A'..'Z'];
end;

{ Recognize a Decimal Digit }
function IsDigit(c: char): boolean;
begin
   IsDigit := c in ['0'..'9'];
end;

{ Get an Identifier }
function GetName: char;
begin
   if not IsAlpha(Look) then Expected('Name');
   GetName := UpCase(Look);
   GetChar;
end;

{ Get a Number }
function GetNum: char;
begin
   if not IsDigit(Look) then Expected('Integer');
   GetNum := Look;
   GetChar;
end;

{ Output a String with Tab }
procedure Emit(s: string);
begin
   Write(TAB, s);
end;

{ Output a String with Tab and CRLF }
procedure EmitLn(s: string);
begin
   Emit(s);
   WriteLn;
end;

{ Initialize }
procedure Init;
begin
   GetChar
end;

{ Main Program }
begin
   Init;
end.

That's it for this introduction. Copy the code above into TP and compile it. Make sure that it compiles and runs correctly. Then proceed to the first lesson, which is on expression parsing.