Abstract

Research into parsing did not end with the 1970s. In this lecture, I will cover several more recent tools which ease compiler front-end construction. This includes a brief look at LEMON , a more modern equivalent to YACC ; parsing expression grammars and packrat parsers; and parser combinators.

These techniques differ from earlier methods, such as LR parsing, in that their underlying formalisms are directly targeted at the problem of parsing programming languages, rather than natural languages. This allows them to offer programmer friendly interfaces and good performance.

This lecture should be helpful to anybody who has to read structured data from a text file…