OS/2 Shareware BBS: 10 Tools/10-Tools.zip/snip9707.zip/EVAL.HOW

Text File | 1997-07-05 | 2KB | 38 lines

+++Date last modified: 05-Jul-1997

  Basically, EVAL.C converts infix notation to postfix notation. If you're
not familiar with these terms, infix notation is standard human-readable
equations such as you write in a C program. Postfix notation is most familiar
as the "reverse Polish" notation used in Hewlett Packard calculators and in
the Forth language. Internally, all languages work by converting to postfix
evaluation. Only Forth makes it obvious to the programmer.

  EVAL.C performs this conversion by maintaining 2 stacks, an operand stack
and an operator stack. As it scans the input, each time it comes across a
numerical value, it pushes it onto the operand stack. Whenever it comes
across an operator, it pushes it onto the operator stack. Once the input
expression has been scanned, it evaluates it by popping operands off the
operand stack and applying the operators to them.

 For example the simple expression "2+3-7" would push the values 2, 3, and 7
onto the operand stack and the operators "+" and "-" onto the operator stack.
When evaluating the expression, it would first pop 3 and 7 off the operand
stack and then pop the "-" operator off the operator stack and apply it. This
would leave a value of -4 on the stack. Next the value of 2 would be popped
from the operand stack and the remaining operator off of the operator stack.
Applying the "+" operator to the values 2 and -4 would leave the result of
the evaluation, -2, on the stack to be returned.

  The only complication of this in EVAL.C is that instead of raw operators
(which would all have to be 1 character long), I use operator tokens which
allow multicharacter operators and precedence specification. What I push on
the operator stack is still a single character token, but its the operator
token which is defined in the 'verbs' array of valid tokens. Multicharacter
tokens are always assumed to include any leading parentheses. For example, in
the expression "SQRT(37)", the token is "SQRT(".

  Using parentheses forces evaluation to be performed out of the normal
sequence. I use the same sort of mechanism to implement precedence rules.
Unary negation is yet another feature which takes some explicit exception
processing to process. Other than these exceptions, it's pretty
straightforward stuff.