Thank you for the excellent tips, rstanley. I'll do what you suggest. Meanwhile, please suggest a program to replace splint because I don't think anyone ported lint to MacOS. That OS doesn't even come with yacc and bison. Then again, I'll think I'm cheating to use a parser generator when I write a compiler.
Naturally, I know that sane programmers don't want to reinvent the wheel. So I realize that a parser generator would save me plenty of work and even a headache or two. But I want to learn how to write elegant code on my own. If you've read any programs a from a parser generator, you know it won't make you exclaim, "Wow, that's gorgeous."
You should have seen the lousy Cobol programs I maintained years ago. I still hate the wordy language. When I program, I want my code's meaning to be clear to anyone who knows the language I wrote it in. But that goal is hard to reach when you need about 20 lines to write a "Hello, world" program.
Though I don't mean to brag, in my Cobol days, only I knew how to find a square root in Cobol. Or so it seemed. Another programmer earned a B.S. degree in mathematics before his programming carer. Nobody there thought, "Aha, I'll raise a number to the half power."
I drove home, translated a Pascal function into Cobol, and handed the Cobol code to them mathematician who thought it contained in infinite loop. But another guy added my code the program that needed it. That code worked correctly the first time and forever after that. Maybe that convinced the other programmers that it was good for me to keep my head in the academic clouds, though I risked getting my nose sideswiped by a Boeing 767.
Then again, it disappointed me to know the square root "function" was the only original code I put into production back then. I longed for a day when my boss would let me write a program from scratch because my AI professor said I wrote "damn good code." That boss handed me a specification for a new program before we discovered that his boss decided to lay me off. Yes, I do mean "layoff." It's not a euphemism for getting fired. A few mons later, the company went out of business.
