Java Platform Module System

[Alex Buckley]

On 5/2/2017 7:07 AM, Jayaprakash Arthanareeswaran wrote:
> Chapter 2 in [1] describes context-free grammars. The addition to "3.9
> Keywords" defines "restricted keywords", which prevent the grammar for
> ModuleDeclaration from being context-free. This prevents compilers from
> using common parser generators, since those typically only support
> context-free grammars. The lexical/syntactic grammar split defined in
> chapter 2 is not of much use for actual implementations of
> module-info.java parsers.
> The spec at least needs to point out that the given grammar for
> ModuleDeclaration is not actually context-free.

The syntactic grammar in JLS8 was not context-free either; the opening 
line of Chapter 2 has been false for years. For JLS9, I will remove the 
claim that the lexical and syntactic grammars are context-free, and 
perhaps a future JLS can discuss the difficulties in parsing the 
syntactic grammar.

Alex