Re: gcc compile-time performance

[Robert Dewar]

<<The "right" way to do it if you have a hand-written parser is to try to
go forward under more than one assumption: either the undefined name is
an identifier, or it is a type.  Picking the wrong assumption will
generate a cascade of errors; picking the right assumption will only
generate one or two.  We actually added a couple of simple rules of this
type around the 3.0 timeframe, e.g. for "foo bar;" where foo is
undeclared, assumes that foo is a type, so bar gets marked as a value
whose type is {error}.
>>

Yes, that's reasonable, one can have a special entity designation internally
that is type-or-identifier. In GNAT we do a lot of such tracking (all the
entities called Any_xxx are for this purpose). The exact handling is of course
VERY language dependent.